Red Herring. Completely irrelevant. Kuwait called us in when invaded. We kicked saddams butt back across the border. We told Saddam... you will do this and this and this, in the form of UN resolutions because we were playing nice. Saddam BLATANTLY VIOLATED everything we asked for. We gave him over a DECADE to comply, which is absurd in my opinion. We went back in and enforced what we promised to do. End of story. NOT preemptive in the least. The WMD thing was just icing on the cake because americans are spineless with short memories who did NOT want to enforce the original cease fire agreement. peace axeman
We? Oh, you mean just the USA and a handful of allies, and not the rest of the world, not NATO, and not the UN Security Council? The revlevance is that you stated a "contract" and that "contract" was with the UN, not just the USSAPD (United States Self Appointed Police Department). We ignored the terms of our "contract" and made up our own to meet Bush's schedule. We engaged in an illegal (from an International Law perspective) pre-emptive, unilateral war....end of story.
More spin. We didn't HAVE to go to the UN at all, after desert storm, now did we? We were just playing nice with the international community. The UN proved it was completely ineffective and asleep at the wheel as a policing force. It utterly FAILED at enforcing its own contracts. It proved itself a joke, while a maniac continued to do whatever he wanted to. We won the first war. We set the terms. We enforced them. Its as simple as that. We enforced them WAY TOO LATE, in my opinion. Mostly because of a spineless president in the interim. It was not preemptive. It was enforcement. People who call it preemptive just like to spin this as a whole new conflict, and pretend the Kuwait war never happened, that we didn't win, and we have no right to set the cease fire rules. Not the case. We won. Our rules. Our right to enforce as the UN sleeps like a drunken prison guard as the bandits lift his keys and escape. peace axeman
Syria sits on the U.N. Security council. Wow, what an august body!! For a U.S. President to allow our interests to be dictated by the U.N. is impeachable. An organization that would sanction the merciless bombing of Kosovo yet turn a blind eye toward the blatant violations of Iraq deserves to be treated with contempt.
Then why even bother going to the U.N. to make a case? Hey, we have the firepower, just fuck em, right? Might makes right, eh?
Huh? Your implying that if someone justifies his actions he is automatically somehow associated with the lawless? peace axeman
Gadaffi hasn't been a threat to national security since his palace was bombed by Reagan. In order to be a threat you need not only weapons, but the will to use them. The prospect of a nation state being vaporized within minutes of any WMD attack on the US means that no country poses a credible threat to America. The Soviets and the Chinese didn't attack the west during the cold war, so a weak middle eastern country which lacks even the delivery systems to launch a nuclear attack is hardly anything to worry about. It is terrorist groups who pose the real threat, since they can attack without being subject to nuclear strikes in reprisal. If such a group were to vaporise a major US city, it would not be clear what the US could do to stop another attack. That is the real threat, not a country which has been a harmless bit player for the last decade and a half. Therefore I would much rather see Bush pressure Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran and Pakistan so that they are no longer funding terrorism, and are in fact rounding up the more radical groups. The news from Libya sounds good but is strategically pretty unimportant.
Illogical supposition on your part, naturally. All lawless people justify crime. Bob justifies what he does. Therefore Bob is a criminal??? I didn't imply anything at all about the justificators of the war beyond the fact that they have something in common with the lawless...i.e. rationalization and justification of their actions in the face of strong criticism.......but if you feel like a criminal, or if you see their violation of International law as the implication of a crime, fine by me....no argument here. See, when you can't make a case on principles or law, you have no choice but to justify.