There are serious questions that need to be asked about the U.S presidency and the job it's doing, and the people who do that shouldn't be angry lefties like myself. It should be the right who voted for him!

Well, as you said the prevailing culture among those represented by the town you described does not allow that questioning. So there was, is or will be no questioning of anything done by this Admin by them.

The problem in mho is that culture . Unfortunately, a significant segment of the society still lives and believes in that culture.

then i guess you missed my thread on home land security. or my other statements on home land security.


according to another post bush is the worse president. in my opinion bush is only the third worse in my life time granted i have really known 6. ford, carter, Reagan, bush 1, Clinton, bush 2.

from best to worse in my opinion.


Reagan Bush 2, Clinton, carter, ford was only president in name. bush 1 was riding reagan's coat tails. so these two don't count in my opinion.

Thanks daniel, I will go and find your thread on homeland security and give it a go. To this day I still don't understand why people feel that they have to defend the candidate they voted for. For example, I voted for my current member of parliament and I'm very happy with the job he's doing. But I'm also very critical of the job he's doing BECAUSE I voted for him. When I get into a discussion with someone in my riding who is against the MP I voted for and they start questioning his performance, I don't immediately reject their attacks but seriously consider them. Quite often they've brought up legitimate questions that I have then taken to my MP's office as a well-intentioned inquiry. In my opinion doing that is a necessary part of democracy to keep the person you voted for accountable!

don't know never tasted him. get it.

To this day I still don't understand why people feel that they have to defend the candidate they voted for.

For the most part, most do not - normally.  What you are hearing is less a defense and more of a knee jerk to the hate coming from the other side.  If you had a problem with your friend, and someone said to you "I think he should cut down on his drinking", you would probably agree and have a discussion on how that might be accomplished.

But if someone came up to you and called him a $*(@#^*(#_&$^ drunk, you would probably get defensive and all chances of a rational discussion about your friend would be gone.

So it is with Bush.  If the left did not "hate" him, there would be plenty of room for discussion on him and you would hear a lot fewer defending him - or defending him less.  But instead of trying to sway with calm rational logic and cool reasoning, the opposition uses heated - and face it - idiotic rhetoric that belongs in school yards, not debating circles.  And we are not talking about the Sheehans of the world necessarily.  Just listen to any democrat debate when they start talking about Bush.  And he is not even running.

Stick around JU - read some of the regulars' past articles.  With few exceptions, none of the conservatives march in lock step with Bush, and have written articles and comments negative about him.  When discussing with other rational people it is easy to find common ground on his faults.  When talking with the loony loopy luddite left - it is not.

I believe he has lied to the good folks of the U.S.

Clinton's administration and all western governments have said the same things about Iraq.

I am serious: have they ALL lied (then why single out George Bush) or was ONLY George Bush clever enough to see through it (and hence the only one lying as opposed to having been deceived by faulty intelligence)?

This was illustrated in his reaction to 9/11 and hurricane Katrina. Did you see the footage when he was sitting in that classroom when the planes hit? When they told him the news he just sat there. No questions, no jumping into decisive action. It wasn't until several minutes later one of his handlers told him it would be a good idea for him to go did he actually get up and leave the room.

The man was shocked. What did you want him to do? Panic? Make a quick decision? That's the same guy you believed lied to you when he repeated what everybody was saying.

So the country was being attacked and the president stayed calm. Big deal.

"Question the Iraq war? What are you, some kind of terrorist?"

That's not what the left are doing. They do not "question" the Iraq war, they flat out deny even the possibility that the invasion was anything but a racist revenge on Saddam Hussein and the "brown people".

If you want to "question" the Iraq war, go ahead and question it. But I have seen few people do that. And those who do are not usually angry at George Bush.

But, honestly, can you look at the pictures of gased kurds in the north and massgraves in the south of Iraq and still insist that removing that man from power was morally wrong?

Do the people who "question" the Iraq ever even mention Saddam's crimes? Do you think they "question" the actual war and not their weird image of it? Making up a number of victims and blaming the US for them (even though it is clearly Arab terrorists who blow up schools and mosques in Iraq) is NOT "questioning" George Bush's policies. It is IGNORING his policies and the facts and spreading hatred.

I have even read people say that Israel exported its "torture methods" to Iraq now, as if a) it was well known that Israel tortures (except that the only evidence for that is that Israel is Jewish) and there was no torture in Saddam's Iraq before the invasion. Seriously, how is that "questioning" the war?

The next time you meet somebody who "questions" the Iraq war, ask him the following four questions:

1. How many people died in Saddam's wars against Iran, the Kurds, Kuwait, and American and British troops?

(Answer: Several million.)

2. How many people did Saddam kill in the south of Iraq to fill several massgraves?

(Answer: A few hundred thousand .)

3. How many people have died since the invasion?

(Answer: A few ten thousand. A few hundred thousand would require mass graves or furnaces, unless the Americans know a method to make bodies vanish that the Nazis and Saddam did not know about.)

4. How did Saddam Hussein support terrorists?

(Answer: He was financing Palestinian terrorists and allowed Al-Qaeda to run a base in Iraqi Kurdistan.)

If the person "questioning" the war does not know the answers to at least three of these questions, you can safely dismiss his criticisms. He is not talking about the Iraq war. He doesn't know anything about the Iraq war. It is not necessary to listen to him, as he never cared to do his homework before making up his opinion. He has nothing useful to say.

BTW, they did find some chemical weapons in Iraq. Apparently it was a German brand. Isn't that great? I grew up in Germany and had to learn that German poison gas was used to gas undesired races (Kurds, in this case) as late as 1989. I am SOOOO proud of my country. Of course, in Germany people were opposed to the war and made fun of the Poles for joining the coalition and for once winning a war. Very funny, the Germans.

 

1. How many people died in Saddam's wars against Iran, the Kurds, Kuwait, and American and British troops?

Funny, Saddam was the golden boy of the U.S right up until he invaded Kuwait. The war against Iran was a proxy war that he fought on behalf of the U.S (much as the northern Alliance fought a proxy war to oust the Taliban in Afghanistan). Do you remember Rumsfeld meeting with Saddam? The chemical weapons that he used on the kurds were largely provided by the U.S. The only reason why the Iran-Iraq war lasted so long was because of the funding, intel and weapons support he received from western powers. A lot of the funding for that war came from Kuwait. When his war failed, they stuck him with the bill and he didn't want to pay. So that's part of the reason why he invaded Kuwait. Since he had failed in his assignment from the States to take out Iran and he was no longer an obedient puppet (similar thing happened with Noriega) Bush 1 decided that Saddam had outlived his usefullness.

Saddam could have killed all the kurds in Iraq and the western powers and media wouldn't have given it a second glance. Once he stopped obeying his instructions from the US, they decided it was time to take him out, and the Kurds would be a handy ally "in country" against him, hence why they suddenly were so concerned with protecting them. In fact, after Iraq 1, Bush 1 went on the airwaves and urged the people of Iraq to rise up against Saddam, promising support for them in their struggle. Many people did try to rise up and take him out thinking that the U.S would help them. It was an empty promise that killed a lot of people and Bush 1 shares some of that blood on his hands because of it. When the people tried to rise up the U.S and international forces stayed on their side of the border and ALLOWED the republican guard to slaughter people wholesale.

3. How many people have died since the invasion?

Actually the numbers are closer to 1 million dead, 2 million refugees displaced, mainly to surrounding countries. Most of those who have been killed or died happened after Bush's "mission accomplished" photo-op. Milions of people have been killed before in countries with little to no uproar on the world stage. If you'll recall in Rwanda in 1994 the nightmare that unfolded there. Hutus started slaughtering Tutsis (or anyone suspected of being sympathetic to them) wholesale. Using machetes and axes they achieved a greater rate of murder than the Nazis accomplished in WW2 with their industrialized killing machine- during a 100 day period Interahamwe militia and associated groups killed an estimated 800,000 to 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The world sat back and watched, and intervention was VETOED by the U.S rep on the UN security council!!!!

The Ethiopian/Eritrean war killed at least 80,000 people directly and tens of thousands more died as a result of the conditions with hundreds of thousands displaced as refugees. This happened 1998-2000 with nary a peep from CNN. Again, another case in which no one in the west cared about the plight of other people.

Kosovo was an intervention, but as a foreign policy choice, it had nothing to do with humanitarian reasons (otherwise NATO probably wouldn't have bombed so much civillian targets and infrastructure in Serbia!)

And now what's happening in Sudan? Bush and the administration are quite content to let the country go to hell, but yet for some magical reason they're so caring about the plight of the Iraqi people that they decided to liberate them at gunpoint?

The man was shocked. What did you want him to do? Panic? Make a quick decision? That's the same guy you believed lied to you when he repeated what everybody was saying. So the country was being attacked and the president stayed calm. Big deal.

Bush has a history of his "deer in the headlights" syndrome. Whenever any kind of un-scripted event occurs he is stunned, which I find an alarming trait for a president. Remember, when he was briefed about Katrina he didn't ask any questions. He didn't take control or ownership of the situation. He has a history of doing this. Basic leadership 101 states that in order for any situation to be resolved properly, someone has to take the initiative, take ownership and can't assume that everything is going to be handled. He was briefed in august 2001 about serious concerns that intel had about impending terror attacks. After the briefing all he said was "ok, you've covered your ass"- no follow ups, no serious questions or consideration given. A real leader would have asked what the next logical steps should have been. He just shrugged and went on about his day.

Same thing in Iraq. His biggest concern was that whoever the new Iraqi leader is that it be someone who would be properly grateful to the U.S for their intervention. He had no concerns for a concrete plan to re-build the country after invasion (which Intel repeatedly said would be the biggest problemm), and when things didn't go according to the "everything will just sort itself out plan" he did nothing for too long, allowing for the fomenting of a completely unnecessary and completely avoidable insurgency that just now is starting to tamper down a bit. Finally he had the brilliant revelation to send more troops to the country. What a genius.

And there you have it.

"Questioning" the war, i.e. making up numbers, even your own history.

Artysim,

Saddam was NOT the darling of the US. In fact he was the darling of the Soviets, which is why his army used Soviet weaponry. The US tend to have darlings who buy American weaponry.

As for the number of deaths you are making up, please try a more realistic lie. Saddam needed mass graves to get rid of a few hundred thousand bodies, how could the current Iraqi government and the Americans get rid of 1000 bodies a day? It's impossible. The Nazis used furnaces. You just can't get rid of the evidence.

As for Sudan, have you ever thought that it might be people like you who are making it simply impossible to act against the Sudanese government?

You would simply watch the Sudanese government fall and then make up stupid stories about the US involvement, like the claim that George Bush supported the Sudanese government or that millions of people died since the invasion or something other ridiculous like it.

You are an idiot, that's everybody's problem. And you can't do maths and don't know history, otherwise you would stop short of making really ridiculous claims.

Iraq's population is less than 30 million. If one million of them had died within 4 years, you would have to deal with just short of 700 violent deaths a day. Since nothing is happening in Kurdistan most of those would happen in Baghdad (4.5 million people). And incidentally, Baghdad is NOT digging mass graves. So how are they getting rid of the (fictional) bodies?

I assume you believe that the Americans are extra-evil (more eviler than skeletor) and can make bodies disappear (and that proves they are really really evil, doesn't it) and don't have to worry about such a tiny detail. But oddly enough, even the Nazis had to.

Killing 6 million people in four years in death camps alone in an area much larger than Iraq required furnaces to get rid of the bodies. Dd you even consider this when you made up your numbers? (Or ask whatever idiot told you about those numbers.) Did you even do the math and figure out what your numbers mean per day? I doubt it.

Yes, the west doesn't usually care if bad things happen to people far away.

But the reason for that is people LIKE YOU, not people like George Bush.

Rumsfeld met a lot of heads of state in his time. How you deduce an alliance from such a meeting is beyond me (and quite obviously beyond you). It is well-known who sold weapons and chemicals to Iraq, SIPRI have a file on it. And despite your lies, it was not the US. It was Russia, China, France, and, to a small extent, Germany. Britain and the US were not involved. That's just some thing you made up. (Or somebody told you and you never bothered to check because it was convenient enough.)

But thanks for demonstating my point: "questioning" the war is simply a polite term for talking total and utter nonsense. What you say above is nothing more than utter nonsense. That is fairly obvious.

The old urban legends about the US supporting Saddam is one of the more insane examples of lefty stupidity. In the 1980s the big scandal was that a Republican administration supported Iran in its war against Iraq. And now the big scandal is that the Republican administrations supported Iraq against Iran. Make up your mind, liberals. Can't blame George Bush for everyting yet, can you?

(And if the Americans do have mass graves for their victims in Iraq, we will just have to make sure that possible inspectors are not allowed to see them. As we all know, inspectors not finding anything proves that it doesn't exist, even when it was seen earlier.)

Oh Leauki, and here I thought we were getting along so well! I do not know you, and make no pretenses to say otherwise. You don't know me or anything about me, and yet are quick to call me an idiot and say that everything's my fault. I don't think you're an idiot, and I'm not going to start making assumptions. I have no problem with you insulting me, but I would prefer to debate these things instead of devolving into name calling and finger pointing. I'm just trying to have a constructive conversation here, and gain insight from the other side of the fence. Nor am I even an American, I am a Canadian and back when the genocide was happening in Rwanda there was a Canadian general in charge of the ridiculously understrength UN forces in country. He tried to do everything in his power to save as many people as possible, but it was the U.S rep on the security council that tied his hands and stalled things until it was too late. Even so he did everything in his power to save as many people as possible. I believe that the Iraq invasion to this day is illegal and I'm glad that my country did not get involved in it. Pretty quickly the Aussies will be pulling out and the UK is quietly moving towards the door, too.

In regards to being ignorant of history, that is always open to debate depending on one's interpretation of events... if you want to talk about massive bloodshed, let's talk about what happened in Indonesia a few decades back when the U.S directly contributed to the overthrow of the democratically elected Sukarno to be replaced with the monster Suharto who killed over a million of his own citizens and turned the country into a nightmare for years to come. Or about how the CIA overthrew the democratically elected Mossadegh in Iran in 53, to replace him with the monster the Shah, who makes Saddam look like a boyscout in comparison (and turned the popular sentiment in country against the U.S for supporting him, something still seared on the psyche's of most Iranians to this day)

I do not believe that America is an evil country, please don't put words in my mouth. I DO think that it's foreign policy abroad since the end of WW2 has been less than stellar and could do with a serious overhaul. I think that 99.9% of Americans are the nicest, hardest working people you'll ever meet. I also believe that many of those good folks have been kept in the dark as to what has been done abroad, supposedly in their name.

In regards to a little history about the U.S-Iraq relations, please give this a read-

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/

Oh boy Arty,

It's not getting any better. The Shah was put into power in 1941 to make sure Iran would stay on the allied side in the war against Germany. The CIA didn't "overthrow" Mossadegh in 1953 and replaced him with the Shah, the Shah WAS the legitimate ruler of Iran at the time. I don't know how you can call the Iraq war "illegal" and then note care about legality in the case of Iran.

The Shah was also not a monster that made Saddam look like a boyscout. The Shah did not start wars that killed millions. He also didn't murder hundreds of thousands of his own population.

As for the link about US-Iraq relations, it does line out that not the US but the Soviet-Union provided Iraq with arms. The US provided arms to Iran and intelligence to Iraq. That's a fairly normal way to deal with conflicts between two countries one cannot stand. Israel also helped Iran in that war, btw. But I would hardly call them friends of each other.

You truly are ignorant of history, but that didn't stop you from believing stupid things and basing an opinion on it.

Your belief in legality is good. But please stick to it when it comes to defending existing governments (like the Shah's, Mossadegh was his prime minister and overstepped his responsibilities) and perhaps consider not sticking to it so much when it comes to international law protecting people like Saddam Hussein. Sometimes lives are more important than legality. (There is also the question about why it was illegal to invade a country that violated a cease-fire agreement because there is certainly no law that forbids continuing a war if a cease-fire gets broken.)

I don't know much the CIA had to do with Suharto's coup.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overthrow_of_Sukarno#U.S._assistance_to_Suharto

Wikipedia says Sukarno started it all when he murdered a few generals. But of course, why shouldn't I trust the report of someone who has just impressed me with his belief that the Americans ar capable of losing 700 bodies a day without anybody finding furnaces or mass graves.

I haven't said that you are too blame for everything, but for a lack of support for an inervention in Sudan you have certainly your share of responsibility.

And shame on Canada for abandoning the people of Iraq. How can you be proud of the fact that your country helped the dictator?

As for the genocide in Rwanda, you can choose to blame the US for stopping Canada from saving those people, but it's again pretty much a phantasy. The truth is that the UN, the same orgaanisations whose law you think must be followed when it comes to Iraq, simply failed to do anything.

The UN is simply not a moral organisation. It is not the "good side". It watched over genocide and protects dictators. That's all the UN are doing these days. How you can use the UN as a moral authority and "international law" as a reason not to invade a country is beyond me.

FACT is that it was _never_ illegal before to continue a war if a cease-fire is broken by the other side. That only _became_ illegal, apparently, when Saddam violated a cease-fire and the US decided to invade.

An invasion is the only thing those dictators deserve. And if you are worried about the innocent victims, pray that the nutty left stops giving the terrorists the hope that America will withdraw if the "resistance" is only violent enough.

You can have your "constructive conversation", but you will have to come up with something better than ridiculous made-up numbers. You couldn't even be bothered to check when the Shah actually ruled before you claimed that the CIA brought him to power in 1953, let alone read about what the Shah actually did.

Let me tell you this:

The Shah was a great man and the best guarantee for peace in a region that just after he lost control became a death trap for millions. He was violent, but have now seen why that violence was necessary.

I know the left-wing propaganda is that the Shah was brought to power in 1953 and then murdered millions of people (i.e. worse than Saddam); but the plain truth is that he replaced his father in 1941 to make sure that the Soviet-Union could be supplied for her war against Germany and that he was absolutely not even in the same class or category as Saddam Hussein.

Without the Shah, the war in Russia would have taken much longer, as supplies (food, medicines, arms) wouldn't have reached the Soviet-Union and millions more would have died. He was the best ally the allied forces had in the region and if you cannot appreciate what he did for the Russians (and the western allies), you can at least try not to vilify the man after his death.

Isn't international law great?

Nothing wrong with slaughtering people wholesale. That doesn't justify an invasion. But crossing the border to stop the dictator, THAT is a violation of international law.

So what is it? Are you angry at the US for following international law or for breaking international law?

Arrgghh, damn you JU!!! (shakes fist in anger)

Leauki, please believe me when I say that I spent the last half hour composing my response to you, only to click on "post comment" to get a wonderful URL error.

Suffice it to say that I respectfully disagree with you and look forward to picking your brains as we obviously have differing viewpoints. Remember, it is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it!

I also launched into a small diatribe on my favourite brand of ice cream, a critique which shall forever be lost to the interweb.... oh the humanity....