Quote:
Originally posted by boatin
Bush telling his own people (and the world) that there are WMD in Iraq is not marketing. He has spent billions of dollars, cost American lives, jeopardized relations with our oldest allies, created the possibilities of more anti-American feeling, rolled the dice on destabilizing the most unstable region in the world and has raised concerns about our imperialist designs.
That's marketing? We are going to be cleaning up and concerned with the after affects of this war for a generation.
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1) I've always said that Clinton was cool, and I have never blamed him for lying.
2) I think Bush thought there were WMDs in Iraq, and I even agreed with him. I do not know what happened to them, or if they were even there to begin with; I do think we'll find evidence either way eventually. I just don't think you can say there aren't any WMD yet... Think about it: if Iraq had them, and doesn't now, why on earth didn't Saddam provide the *evidence* he should have (and could have)? He could have ended the sanctions, and stayed in power. Instead, he delayed the whole process indefinately, and never really cooperated with the UN inspections. Why?
3) Attacking Iraq was a gamble, but not attacking them was *also* a gamble (especially without that evidence I mentioned above). You can see the results already, with US forces being pulled out of Saudi-Arabia... Their presence was one of the reasons Osama gave for his holy war, remember? (Of course, he'll still go on attacking) Also, if democracy works in Iraq, that's a great example to the other countries in the region.
4) You don't *know* what the after-effects of this war will be; you cannot know if they'll be negative or positive; you seem to focus on the negative sides, while I prefer to focus on the positive. I belief fundamentalist islam has had it's 15 minutes of fame, and that it will eventually go away, like it has done over and over in the past millenium. One can already see the beginnings of that downfall in Iran, with more and more dissent and anger against the fundies.
5) If the US public on the whole doesn't care about foreign policy, and the US government wants to attack a foreign country, they have to focus the public's attention on the potential dangers to them personally. This has happened before, and it will happen again because that's the way it works.
The US public did not want to fight WW1, nor WW2 until it was clear they *had to*. In these cases, there were countless reasons to go to war much sooner than they had: attacks on US ships by Germany in WW1 and 2, and by Japan in WW2, for example; or the morality of stopping a murderous dictator...
In both cases, the US government needed a single defining moment: the Zimmerman telegram, and Pearl Harbor. Even though there had been previous attacks on US targets, these weren't enough to get the US public to support the war... Again, it's playing with people's perception of reality, in order to get them to do something. That's marketing.
Imagine being a US president; you want to attack Mexico, because they're suddenly building nukes, building a huge modern army, and are threatening to attack (hey, it's hypothetical!). At the same time, the US public simply doesn't care about Mexico, and wants peace, because war is bad, m'kay? It must be *really* frustrating... Now, if you use a good marketing campaign to focus the public's attention on the dangers of Mexico (perhaps accentuate certain elements, while ignoring others), you might eventually convince them to do the right thing. Marketing again.