Quote:
Originally posted by smooth
Well, now it seems you've twisted your argument so much that you've circled yourself.
What exactly are you claiming? Are liberals asking for diplomacy or not? First you claimed:
which indicates you are accusing liberals of *not* asking for diplomacy.
I responded with:
in support of my assertion that liberals have, in fact, been consistently been requesting diplomacy in *both* Iraq and N.K. Then I followed it with a question--where have you heard otherwise? Instead of answering, you instead accused the "liberals" of resorting to irrelevant points and non-sequitar (neither of which I did)--a situation I find ironic.
Then you accused liberals of being ignorant to the definition of diplomacy. I responded with a defintion of diplomacy (surprise, the definition I found in my dictionary off the bookcase is similar to the one here
Now you assert that the liberals are accusing the government of not exorcising diplomacy. Actually, throughout the last year we have been voicing our opinion that stonewalling a dangerous threat does not seem to meet the stated goals of long-term domestic security. Obviously, the current talks do not invalidate our claim that *past* refusals to meet were not diplomatic!
To answer your point that the administration has been using diplomatic measures all along directly: I already stated that time will have to illustrate the accuracy of your position. My claim is that what we've gotten (btw, the meeting consisted of confirmation of nuclear weapons and the threat to demonstrate them--hardly fitting the definition of positive relations!) does not seem to indicate all the discussants feel respected. Forcing a foreign power to capitulate through threats or outright force is *not* diplomacy--regardless of the defintion you subscribe to. That does describe our current foreign policy, however. Ruling via threat, fear, or force is, ultimately, the most unstable form of authority. If you haven't learned that, you haven't been reading your history books.
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Not everyone is whining about a lack of diplomacy, which in the context of my definition that I gave you, is an innacurate assumption. Admittedly, I should have used a word refering to liberals that didn't sound like such a blanket statement. I'm sure some may have been asking for diplomacy for the past few months, these ones, like yourself, obviously have a different definition than I, and view the situation and reaction of the North Koreans differently as well.
Respectively, many who make the argument the person I was talking to end up doing, is insinuating they would have rather gone to war with North Korea instead of Iraq as it's such a big threat and has no oil and blah blah blah trying to say Bush is a greedy bully of some sort. I did answer your question, I heard otherwise on this very board, and abroad within non-sequitor arguments attempting to discredit the Iraqi war. Obviously they wouldn't know it at the time, but that's how they come across.