Jericho: The Rebuttal
I just have to voice something here. A point I have long argued with Max has been raised again and I must object.
On just about every point below I agree with Max. I'm sick of the lies, I'm sick of the fear mongering. We are the last country on the planet to experience terrorism and we had better get used to it. We need far more courage and few fewer "no Gatoraid on airlines", knee jerk reactions. On all those points, good on ya, Max.
But, there was one little sentence that needs to be discussed, a fragment of a sentence actually. The war in Iraq is not a "needless war". I would argue just the opposite. Saddam Hussein and his entire regime needed to be removed from Iraq. When Desert Storm ended, Hussein had agreed to several terms. He fulfilled none of his promises and he blatantly violated most of them. For a decade, Iraq was actively firing weapons on US and British planes patrolling the No Fly Zone. True, none of them ever struck home, if one had, there would have been no question of whether to go to war or not. In my opinion, the first missile fired restarted the war. We were fighting an undeclared war for a decade.
Now, I hear you already. Right, there is no proof of connection to Al Qaeda. We have no proof of weapons of mass destruction - even though plenty of chemical weapons were found in Desrt Storm and Hussein is currently on trial for using chemical weapons on his own people. Yes, there was plenty of bad intel, and probably plenty of good intel - we civilians will never get the whole story on that, by design, and I'm okay with that, nature of the intel beast. The first Gulf War was fought over oil, this one was fought for political reasons, I agree. Maybe we should have finished the job the first time around, but hindsight is always 20/20. All of these are valid points. People should be punished for lying to us. We could have found a better way to do this.
But, the War in Iraq, the Gulf War, the War against Hussein, whatever you want to call it, is not needless. Were we lied to? Sure. Governments lie all the time. So do parents. They both lie because they think they know better than those they protect. Is it right? No. Is there another way to do it? Not really. We elect our officials and we hope they tell us lies that won't hurt us. Or, we hope they tell us the lies we want to hear.
For example, we went to war the first time in Iraq over oil, as in, who controls the oil. Many people object to that. Our leaders told us we were freeing an oppressed nation, and maybe we were. In truth, we were protecting the oil in Saudi Arabia and taking a petty tyrant down several dozen notches before he became the new Hitler, where Kuwait equals Sudetenland. Why? The ugly truth, the truth our leaders obfuscate, all of our leaders, so we all feel safe in our beds, is that without that oil, that portable energy source, our standard of living is unsustainable. Unless you are Amish or are living in a similar environment, without oil our standard of living would grind to a halt. All of the things we take for granted would vanish. We don't have alternate energy sources in place. Should we have them? Without question we should. But we don't, so we need the oil. If Hussein had gotten away with annexing Kuwait, he would have taken Saudi, then he would have taken over the rest of OPEC and the Mideast. We would have been paying $5 a gallon for gas in 1995. Who knows what we would be paying now. If Hussein had gotten that additional inflow of power and money, the war would have eventually happened and it would have been bigger and bloodier.
We may not "win" in Iraq. We may fail to set up a stable, self governing body in Iraq. It's too bad that so many people there are willing to kill or die for their political and religious ideals. It's sad that people there don't want to live in peace. Once we do have alternative fuels and infrastructure in place, we won't care any more - they can blow each other to hell all they want. We could have found a better way to start the war, but the war had to be fought, or more precisely, it had to be finished.
On just about every point below I agree with Max. I'm sick of the lies, I'm sick of the fear mongering. We are the last country on the planet to experience terrorism and we had better get used to it. We need far more courage and few fewer "no Gatoraid on airlines", knee jerk reactions. On all those points, good on ya, Max.
But, there was one little sentence that needs to be discussed, a fragment of a sentence actually. The war in Iraq is not a "needless war". I would argue just the opposite. Saddam Hussein and his entire regime needed to be removed from Iraq. When Desert Storm ended, Hussein had agreed to several terms. He fulfilled none of his promises and he blatantly violated most of them. For a decade, Iraq was actively firing weapons on US and British planes patrolling the No Fly Zone. True, none of them ever struck home, if one had, there would have been no question of whether to go to war or not. In my opinion, the first missile fired restarted the war. We were fighting an undeclared war for a decade.
Now, I hear you already. Right, there is no proof of connection to Al Qaeda. We have no proof of weapons of mass destruction - even though plenty of chemical weapons were found in Desrt Storm and Hussein is currently on trial for using chemical weapons on his own people. Yes, there was plenty of bad intel, and probably plenty of good intel - we civilians will never get the whole story on that, by design, and I'm okay with that, nature of the intel beast. The first Gulf War was fought over oil, this one was fought for political reasons, I agree. Maybe we should have finished the job the first time around, but hindsight is always 20/20. All of these are valid points. People should be punished for lying to us. We could have found a better way to do this.
But, the War in Iraq, the Gulf War, the War against Hussein, whatever you want to call it, is not needless. Were we lied to? Sure. Governments lie all the time. So do parents. They both lie because they think they know better than those they protect. Is it right? No. Is there another way to do it? Not really. We elect our officials and we hope they tell us lies that won't hurt us. Or, we hope they tell us the lies we want to hear.
For example, we went to war the first time in Iraq over oil, as in, who controls the oil. Many people object to that. Our leaders told us we were freeing an oppressed nation, and maybe we were. In truth, we were protecting the oil in Saudi Arabia and taking a petty tyrant down several dozen notches before he became the new Hitler, where Kuwait equals Sudetenland. Why? The ugly truth, the truth our leaders obfuscate, all of our leaders, so we all feel safe in our beds, is that without that oil, that portable energy source, our standard of living is unsustainable. Unless you are Amish or are living in a similar environment, without oil our standard of living would grind to a halt. All of the things we take for granted would vanish. We don't have alternate energy sources in place. Should we have them? Without question we should. But we don't, so we need the oil. If Hussein had gotten away with annexing Kuwait, he would have taken Saudi, then he would have taken over the rest of OPEC and the Mideast. We would have been paying $5 a gallon for gas in 1995. Who knows what we would be paying now. If Hussein had gotten that additional inflow of power and money, the war would have eventually happened and it would have been bigger and bloodier.
We may not "win" in Iraq. We may fail to set up a stable, self governing body in Iraq. It's too bad that so many people there are willing to kill or die for their political and religious ideals. It's sad that people there don't want to live in peace. Once we do have alternative fuels and infrastructure in place, we won't care any more - they can blow each other to hell all they want. We could have found a better way to start the war, but the war had to be fought, or more precisely, it had to be finished.
posted by Jericho Brown at 10/21/2006 07:12:00 PM
5 Comments:
$336,201,000,000 is how much we have spent in the Iraq war as I write this.
$336,201,000,000 and tens of thousands dead (if we are so silly as to count the brown people).
$336,201,000,000 could have funded an alternative energy Manhattan Project. But instead we went to war to protect our dependence on people who would just as soon see us die as take our money.c
Okay. Talking about dirty little lies that none of us want to believe. That's a big number. That's all kinds of money.
But, how much of that money is being spent on the American people? That money factors in salaries and food and weapons and gear - most of it made by American workers. You see tens of thousands dead, I see tens of thousands of jobs.
Am I happy about this? No. But, it's an ugly little truth that war is big business. Without it, a lot of Americans would go without jobs. Start with the military, work down to the defense contractors (we both live in Boeing country) stop somewhere around the people that manufacture everything from MREs to bottled water to the little American flag patches on all the uniforms.
If we stopped spending on the military and war fighting - how many people would go without jobs?
I'm a peace-nik, too. I'd love a world without war. War frightens me more deeply than you can imagine. If all the guns in the world were put away tomorrow, I'd be the first one Downtown dancing with a flower in my hair in the biggest hippy love-in of them all! But that's not going to happen. Our enemies are legion. Even our "friends" keep a sharp knife and wait for the right moment.
If we got rid of our military tomorrow, what would happen? Who would attack us first? Do you think no one would? Let's try something less extreme, we decide to never let our military leave our boarders. What would happen? How many petty tyrants would rise up and how many racial wars would happen? How many people would die? How many Iraqs, Irans, Koreas, Chechnyas, Somalias, Haitis, etc? It would be as if the LA Police took the year off and let the streets run wild.
We are the world's police force, by default. If not for us, the rest of the world would fall into chaos and eventually some strong force would rise out of that chaos and come looking for us. We have tried the "let them fight their own wars" tactic before. In the end, we were drug into two world wars. You like throwing around big numbers? See if you can find a number for how much was spent on WWII and then factor in inflation. I'm positive it will dwarf the billions you have noted. We let Hitler go, we let him get out of control and we only battened him down once we were attacked.
$336 B is a lot of money, but it's not enough for what you want to do. Sure, it could fund a heap of research. Maybe even find the sources of energy we need. It's not enough to build the infrastructure to manufacture and distribute that energy. In the meantime, while you have stripped away this money from the military and given it to the reasearchers, someone will have taken over the sources of our current energy supply and deniged them to us and we're left in the Dark Ages.
I love, too, how you use the name of a military project, the project to build the most danergeous weapon known to man, in the same arguement where you are trying to strip the military of it's money. I wonder how much the Manhatten Project would cost in modern dollars ...
Please point where exactly I said we should completely defund the military?
I'll save you the time. I didn't say it anywhere, you ignorant slut.
You claim that the war in Iraq is necesary. Given that just prior to Iraq, we already controlled two thirds of the country, given that Saddam was finally allow weapons inspectors (it was Shrub who told them to leave) and given that the dumbfuck didn't actually have any WMD's, how was this fucking necessary.
Instead of this one bassackward adventure in Iraq, we could have formed a public private partnership to research, find and deploy alternative energy. How would that not create jobs?
But, no. Intead of that, we should attack a country that was no threat, kill over 2000 of our soldiers and Allah knows how many Iraqis and insure our future insecurity by maintaining our dependance on foreign oil. And that is a good thing?
If we already had alternative energy sources in place, we wouldn't even have this conversation. We wouldn't care about the middle east. We'd probably sell guns and bombs to all sides and let them finish themselves off.
But, we don't have it in place, do we? Conservative predictions are it will be a decade before we do.
So, say we had pulled out of Iraq entirely. Say we never went to war with them a second time. Say we put your $336 B to work on alternative fuels. Maybe it halves the time it would take to get research complete and infrastructure built. Maybe. Let's just say for argument it would be five years.
It would take far less than five years for Saddam to have raised a new army, send them to Kuwait and Saudi, take that oil, then begin to work on the rest of the middle east. In that time he would possess a third of the oil on the planet. Maybe it takes him two or three years, I imagine quite a bit less.
Do you want to spend 24 months with gas at $10 a gallon? How about 36 months? I'm betting in less than 6 months, the western world would have fallen apart. Without oil, one of the leading sources of energy in the world, everything unravels. The economy would bottom out, mass layoffs, huge unemployment, starvation, rioting, it spirals downward from there.
Maybe I'm wrong. I just don't see any proof to say I might be.
I also remember the weapons inspectors issue a little differently ...
With the embargo in place, it is doubtful he could have built up this mighty army of fantasy. And I would point out that over a decade passed since his last excursion. Why was he suddenly a threat in 2002?
Regardless, we were in Arabia and Kuwait, not to mention the no fly zones in Iraq. If the Rpublican Guard made any threatening moves, we would have handed Saddam a big ol' oil drum of whoop-ass well before he threatened the oil supply.
I would suggest checking the history of weapons inspection just before Operation Osama Bin Who?
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