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Originally posted by Dragonlich
First of all, please keep it civil. Calling me or my statements "idiotic" is insulting.
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I'm sorry you feel that way, but I stand by my statement. Note that I haven't yet called
you an idiot, merely your arguments.
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I did not say that I was willing to sacrifice 5000 people for "political gain".
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But that's exactly what this war was. With the Bush Administration's justifications for this war falling like a hard rain, it becomes increasingly clear that whatever other supposed reasons we had to go to war, political and economic gain ranked highly among them. After all, the WMD argument has gotten hazier and hazier with each passing week, the nuclear weapons argument has been quite thoroughly debunked, and the al-Quaeda connection theory has been essentially gutted.
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If you want to see those two positive effects as mere "political gain", that is *your* problem.
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It's called a "jaundiced eye." I note with some amusement, however, your staunch reliance upon one and only one valid argument: liberation. This might serve quite well for you, but it does not serve well for the international community or for the facts of the case laid by the United States before the United Nations. Our case was based entirely upon the putative existence of weapons of mass destruction; a case which has since been proven to be more ideology than substantive fact. Where was Colin Powell standing before the General Assembly pleading for the liberation of Iraq? Where were the impassioned appeals to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights? They were nowhere, which tells me that
if liberation was among the reasons for this invasion, it was pretty damned far down the totem pole.
Why do I bring this point up? Because you consistently play the "liberation card." But this war and the public support behind it was never, not
ever based upon the prospective liberation of Iraq. It was all about the weapons of mass destruction. With that justification having been revealed as deeply flawed with an increasing likelihood of deliberate deceit, the evidence clearly and increasingly weighs in favor of the attempted gain of political and economic capital by the Bush Administration.
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Fact: Saddam killed some 20,000 people a year, on average.
Fact: We *accidentally* killed some civilians, as unfortunately happens in wars.
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And we killed between 6087 and 7798 (the most well-researched estimates I'm aware of), in three months. And those are just the confirmed dead. There are also estimated to be
more than 20,000 wounded. That's an overall casualty rate approaching 30,000 in three months. Would you like me to help you with the math? Your other statistics, by the way, do nothing whatsoever to exculpate the United States for these deaths and injuries.
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One might say that by invading Iraq, we *saved* 20,000 people a year, on average.
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What an absolutely repugnant attempt at justification. Tell me: how, exactly, does that make the ones we killed any less dead?
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If I remember correctly, *you* weren't willing to support this war, and wouldn't even like it if the UN were to go in.
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Actually, what I said was that I would have been disappointed had the U.N. passed a resolution authorizing force. But I would have held my peace and accepted what the world wished to see done. As such, your insulting accusations have been trimmed, and will not be spoken of again, save to say that you've got a rather skewed notion of civility.
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By the way: why do you keep inflating those numbers every time you mention them?
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To balance out your consistent lowballing, that's why.
You've still not addressed my central point. We declared that Saddam Hussein possessed several hundred tons in total of multiple, specific types of weapons of mass destruction, including VX, sarin, and botulinum toxin, as well as the means to fabricate and deploy nuclear weapons. We required him to prove that he did not, in fact, possess them. Given that we did not actually know what we claimed to know, how is our demand that Saddam Hussein produce evidence of the destruction of these materials anything less than a logical fallacy? After all, if he didn't actually have it, if we were in fact incorrect as the current preponderance of evidence would suggest, then he couldn't bloody well prove that he'd destroyed it, now, could he?
Nobody can prove a negative. Saddam Hussein cannot prove something has been destroyed if it never existed in the first place. I'm not saying this isn't the case, but I am saying that it very well may be, given the revelations of the weakness in and erroneousness of our WMD arguments.
Whereas you appear to be stating that it doesn't matter if we know what he has or not; all we need do is state our best guess as a fact and leave the burden of proof upon him. This is a logical fallacy and an invalid reason to invade a sovereign nation.
Have a nice day!