Now we all know this could never happen cuz Iraq abandoned their weapons of mass destruction program. Right?

Might take a couple of years, but...

It was funny, but the screen said it was the mother of all flash games. The only "game" quality it even had was one screen where you picked the new Iraqi leader. Other than that it was a flash movie you had to click a lot to continue.

Great stuff.

I think I'll break out the ol' copy of Civ2.

DrToast, please don't try to bring logic into the argument.

Hahaha... That was great! :)

ok they missed the part where the US Army bomb all the wrong targets - weddings, embassys, canadians, baby powder factorys, hospitals, goats and other such targets.

k they missed the part where the US Army bomb all the wrong targets

not to mention cluster bombs in market places, prisoner transports and "accidentally" targetting the Chinese embassy.

Goatman264:
Incompetent twats on speed. Precision, please.

that was realllllly funny

"Mr. President! You're up early!"

i really wanna play civ 2 now...farking macs....

I was expecting lots of American ICBMs to fall all over the place at the end.

Not to start a flamewar or anything, but that link Harmonia posted seems to be about a lot of coallition troops killing a lot of "bad guys" and taking no casualties whatsoever.

Yeah right.

RICE: "Let's make allies in the region by donating them some of our surplus bacon."

I'm dyin' here ...

Unluckyimmortal:

I was expecting lots of American ICBMs to fall all over the place at the end.

That's why it was only WW2.5.

That scenario does seem rather far-fetched.

ShadowLurker - nope i had the embassy covered!

01-28-03 06:54:38 AM Cormee
ok they missed the part where the US Army bomb all the wrong targets - weddings, embassys, canadians, baby powder factorys, hospitals, goats and other such targets.

is quoting yourself bad like masturbation?

"is quoting yourself bad like masturbation?"

Nah, just ending each post with yer handle.

-Scrotar

Odd thing about the tanks Iraq has is that when hit in the turret the turret will flip over 1 and a half times after coming off. This happens every time, but I am not sure why.

I sense a new fad, Scrotar. And we have you to thank for it.


-Scrotar

Its a war of aesthetics, if one can see more bunkers being blown up by precision guided munitions and more nightvision enhanced slaughtering of Iraqi infantry then the general public is happy.

ok they missed the part where the US Army bomb all the wrong targets - weddings, embassys, canadians, baby powder factorys, hospitals, goats and other such targets.

"OH MY GOD THEY'RE COMING STRAIGHT AT US!" ?

~AutomaticHatstand

Whoa Harmonia looks like we've got a new "quagmire" coming up

How about we watch out for that "Harsh Iraqi spring" that will turn Iraq into a graveyard of the imperialist americans

Google search, "quagmire in afghanistan": 314 results

Google search, "harsh Afghan winter": 544 results
Google search, "harsh Ohio winter": 8 results

/rant about journalistic cliches

Are you guys really going to have the same arguments again? Over a Flash animation? Fark, this is getting tedious...

Harmonia: you bought up the old fashioned "quagmire" which I thought had been thoroughly forgotten about by now

oh, Oh, OH, this discussion lacks something... Hmmm.... I KNOW!

"Why do you hate America so much?"

The situation in Afghanistan isn't exactly a ridiculous failure, either.

We aren't doing what we should be doing, though.

All politics aside, that was a damn funny animation:

"Most forces in the region appear to be arranged on an isometric grid!"

Harmonia: Actually, that was exactly what I was saying. We went in, killed a lot of people, got some people we think are bad, and broke a lot of stuff.

So yeah, we own Afghanistan in the sense that it's our mess to clean up. I suggest a Marshall Plan sort of deal, where we spend lots of time and money actually seeing that the country becomes livable and second-world again.

Either that or we could just kill everyone in Afghanistan and pretend it doesn't exist. (That sentence was an example of a form of humor called sarcasm.)

Ironbar: That post was just stupid. The fact that the British did it (or wanted to) doesn't mean that we're justified in leaving Afghanistan to its own devices. I don't think you understood Harmonia's post.

If you can't make a point in under 5000 slides, why even try.

Unless Harmonia believes that Britain's imperialistic policies were justified, he's not living in a glass house.

Don't identify people by their nationality. America's foreign policy has no bearing on my beliefs.

It will be interesting to compare all the predictions to the actual events when they occur.

Just because he subscribes to fallacies in his arguments doesn't mean you have to. It's a terrible habit, don't mimic it.

What's this, a rift among friends? Oh that's just -awful!-
*chuckle*

Ironbar and Unluckyimmortal. You're both from taxachusetts so I don't know why you are arguing about generalisations. Just both go and watch PBS while discussing Dubya's stupidity over some cavier at an MIT function

On that note, time to crack open another Fosters and go round up the 'roos out the back of my house

You weren't mocking, you were using it as an argument tactic.

"Really? Britain tried to take Afganistan twice.

The quote was "take Afganistan in hand and make her a British protectorate", I believe Lord Salisbury said that in 1874."

That seems like an argument to me. It didn't occur to me that you could be mocking his style.

Very funny flash... At the end of the simulation the "projection" is that 1 billion Muslims hate us and want to kill us.

I ran the simulation again with a Gore cabinet and a devastating strategy of appeasement, self-loathing, and hand-wringing, and at the end of the simulation the projection was... that 1 billion Muslims hate us and want to kill us.


benjamini

I like how at the end it says that all of a sudden there are a huge number of Muslims that want to kill us (a billion?), as if that isn't true already.

If only it would happen that way. We could then nuke em all and then have the oil for ourselves and no more dirty, smelly, disgusting, pig raping, muslims.

The internet is a wonderful place. I almost wrote
"invention," but it is, in fact, a landscape, a space
to explore. We have, at our fingertips, all of the
combined wisdom (and idiocy) of our species throughout
our long struggle up towards enlightenment.

The internet is also a horrible place, for there are
dark rooms and hidden sewers where all of the
festering evil we humans commit upon each other are
exposed for those with the stomach to witness it.

I have spent much time in these disgusting realms in
the days since September 11th, 2001. I have forced
myself to endure many videotaped nightmares. I have
seen Africans hacked to pieces with machetes, watched
mere boys shot in the street and left there like dogs
by other Kalashnikov-wielding children. I've seen a
mass execution by firing squad, men tied to poles set
against a gorgeous beach while picnickers cheered and
danced. I've seen a man's hands cut off in front of
his very eyes.

I've seen photos of blackened lumps in a morgue in
Bali, the charred and twisted remains of happy young
men and women in the prime of their lives. I've seen
the unimaginable carnage in the few seconds after a
suicide bombing in Israel, dead and dying old men and
women looking down at their shattered bodies in
disbelief, and yonder the head of the perpetrator
smiling joyously on the sidewalk. I've seen the rage
and joy of pre-teen children as they throw stones at
their murdered neighbors accused of collaboration in
Palestine.

I've seen emergency workers with shovels cleaning up
what's left of people after a Serb mortar attack on a marketplace. I've seen the almost unimaginable cruelty of Chechens screaming Allahu Ackbar! as they decapitate a Russian civilian with a small axe in a forest clearing, and I have watched them cut the throat of a Russian boy soldier with such horror and disgust that I was sick for the rest of the day. I have seen these things, and more.

There are two images I will never forget, and I expect
I will think of them often in the days and weeks to
come. For in the front row of this parade of horror
and depravity, I have watched a fundamentalist Islamic
crowd stone two women to death. They were covered head
to toe in shockingly white linen - the better to see
the bloodstains. Taken into a field and buried up to
their waists, they looked like odd white sails on a
sand horizon, until the stones began to fly, leaving
red carnations where they landed. One of the women
just crumpled, bent at the waist, and I still pray
that this person was knocked unconscious within the
first minute or so. The other did not go peacefully
into that good night. She died fighting and
struggling, enduring the most sickening lurches as the
unseen stones fell on her, twisting under that
now-scarlet hood, trying to protect her face as best
she could, as hundreds of her friends and relatives
vented their rage, calling out the name of their god
as we would cheer on the Tamba Bay Buccaneers. Allahu
Ackbar! Allahu Ackbar! Allahu Ackbar!

I will not forget that image.

And I will not forget another one, either. As long as
I draw breath, I swear I will never forget the sight
of two people holding hands, and leaping from 108
stories above the hard concrete sidewalks that I
myself have walked, gawking skyward at one of the
wonders of the world. I will not forget them. I will
not forget their fall, the spin that finally tore
their hands apart as they fell forever, forever down
that quarter-mile. I will never stop wondering what
they said to each other in that last moment, or their
cries to each other as they launched themselves to
their deaths, having watched their friends take the
same leap a few moments before. I will never forget
what an unimaginable hell that their cozy office, full
of coffee mugs and pictures of grandchildren, had
become in order for them to make that choice, with the
ruins of their friends visible on the streets so far
below them.


Now let me explain why I have sought out such despair
and horror, endured again and again the rising bile,
the nausea, the sickening unclean sense that is cured
only by a long, hot shower.

I do it because I want to see what is, not what has
been fed to me. I have worked as a scientist and a
television editor, and both of these professions have
driven me to seek out the reality, the raw data, the
source footage. I want my worldview and my opinions to
reflect facts, not wishes - no matter how unpleasant
the facts, or how comforting the wishes.

One of the reasons that September 11th remains so
shocking and clear to us today was that it was all raw
and unedited during those first few hours. Bland,
chatty newsmen were rendered speechless, a
tough-as-nails mayor broke down and wept, congressmen spontaneously broke into God Bless America because they didn't know what else to do, and people sent in video of jets flying into buildings, broadcast unedited as their friends screamed Jesus farking Christ!! on network television. It was raw. It was real. It stayed that way for perhaps 48 hours, until people like me (but not me) got a hold of it and turned it into America Mourns with slow-mo flags snapping and moving dissolves of weeping bystanders superimposed over somber musical chords.

Now that awful, enraging footage is being held back,
so as not to enflame public opinion. We are about to
launch a war in which people will die at our hand, and
we have done a dreadful job of making the case for
such an action. Public opinion needs to be enflamed,
because no cold-blooded, clear-eyed look at what we
oppose in this conflict could do anything but enflame
public opinion.

Those who criticize the United States from within
clearly have not seen any of these horrors I have
mentioned, for if they had it could not but mitigate
their rhetoric, and put some perspective into their
arrogant and affluent lives. Those who actually endure
such daily horror as can be found in the world want
one thing and one thing only: they want to come here.
They want to come here NOW.

We never see these grotesque realities on US
television, and yet our news media has not been shy
about reporting the effects of US bombing campaigns,
never missed a chance to show us the weeping civilians
wailing over children lost in US air attacks, never
blanched at showing charred Iraqi soldiers hanging out
of tanks destroyed by our weapons.

However, by showing only our actions, by showing only
what we did to Iraqis without presenting the horrors
they inflicted on Kuwait, we have made an editorial
decision, that being: The US is the cause of, and not
the remedy to, much of the suffering in the world.

That said, in a democracy we are responsible for the
actions of our military. Reporting on the consequences
of our actions is disturbing and demoralizing, and yet
it is well and proper that they do this. We cannot
turn our backs on the actual consequences of our
actions as Americans. We need to see and hear the
result of our military operations, for if we do not we
will lose the shock and outrage, the human compassion
and decency that so often stays our hand. We, as a
nation, learned in Vietnam that war is not jingoistic
glory. It is also not a videogame. It is concentrated, unleashed pain, agony, grief and horror, and real people, people who love their children as much as we do, are going to suffer and die because of the actions we are about to take.

Unlike our political opponents both here and abroad,
we need to fully and completely understand and accept
the consequences of our position. And those
consequences, when making war, are the most solemn and
heavy responsibilities we can bear as a people.

Those protesting this war do not seem to get this at
all. Not only have they failed to make an argument
based on fact and historical precedent, they have
stooped to the most childish and infantile posturing
and rhetoric imaginable. Their chanting has all the mindlessness and cruelty of a kindergarten cabal; their slogans and slanders and taunts seemingly exclusively ad hominem. Watching them on C-Span for as long as you can bear, you rapidly become convinced that they have no point to make at all, other than that the United States is, by definition, the source of all evil and injustice in the world. Conscientious liberals admit in private, and indeed, more frequently in public, to the paucity of thought, the irrationality and sheer lunacy of those who march in our streets in opposition to war with Iraq. I see the absurd posturing of these suburban socialists, listen to the inane chanting from these mall Marxists, watch them return to their Lexus' and their minivans and their SUV's and find myself stuck with Life During Wartime running over and over in my head:

This ain't no party
This ain't no disco
This ain't no foolin' around

This ain't no Mud Club
No CBGB
I ain't got time for that now


As we enter the eve of this war, I am myself torn by a
paradox in human nature that has confused and baffled
minds far greater and more refined than mine. How can
we be both so good and so bad? How can the SS and the
Salvation Army be staffed by the same species? What
exactly is our nature, anyway?

This has been debated for ages, but to me the most
cursory look at the world can quickly and clearly
provide a powerful clue. The single definitive trait
of Homo Sapiens, or greatest - indeed, only strength
as a species, is our limitless adaptability. No other
creature before or since can live anywhere, (or eat
anything) and thrive. From the bleached sands of the
Sahara to the ice floes of the pole, we can adapt and
prosper. We can be found in every latitude, in the far
reaches of space, and at the bottom of the ocean. We
appear to be infinitely programmable, and so we adapt
to anything.

In societies where cruelty and domination rule, we are
capable of the most unspeakable acts of torture,
repression and murder. In the streets of
revolution-torn Africa, in torture chambers in South
America, in the killing fields of Asia, the Gulags of
the steppes, the European death camps and the American
cotton plantations we see refined and perfected
barbarism and inhumanity.

Some say this is just human nature. And yet, and yet,
in those few historical moments where freedom and
prosperity and democracy are allowed to flourish and
grow, we are startled by the near total absence of
such plagues. No democracy has ever declared war on
another. They may have endured hunger, but no true
democracy has ever faced actual famine. Individual
crime and atrocity have sadly not been banished, but
bloodshed and massacre in the streets day after day
are unimaginable. Entire communities and nations have
been built and survive on deeply cherished ideals of
liberty and freedom.

Where the people rule, soldiers do not come jackbooted
in the night. Decency, trust, respect and cooperation
are the coin of such a realm, and their by-products
are equality, prosperity, and happiness. And by any
measure, the most free and prosperous and inventive of
these societies may be found in the United States of
America.

We have managed, as a nation, to build and maintain
what might best be thought of as a bubble of freedom,
safety and opportunity. We have paid for this
privilege through two and a half centuries by wars
that have taken the best of our sons and fathers, and
now our mothers and daughters as well. We have for two
hundred and fifty years found our voice and our
memories intact, and now stand at the doorstep of a
new millennium facing a world that has once again
largely chosen to ignore the lessons of history.

We and two or three other nations, old and true
friends who have stood by us through flame and terror,
now confront a menace the likes of which we have not
seen for almost a thousand years. We face an adversary
in the full bloom of romance with death and
destruction, an enemy willing - eager -- to spray our
cities with a virus it has taken armies of scientists
and doctors, working diligently through centuries of
research and learning, to eradicate from the
blood-soak rolls of history. We face fanatics who
would bring down the entire world, themselves
included, in a radioactive Armageddon, secure in their
own twisted souls of the heavenly rewards of sexual gratification and revenge for their many abject failures. We face people such as this, people who are so far beyond the pale of human mercy and so corrupted by black and bitter rage that they must be killed, for nothing else will stop them, nothing - as they tell us at every opportunity.

We have blithely ignored them for many years, turned a
deaf ear to their warnings and fatwahs, turned an even
more blinded eye to their procession of
assassinations, massacres, bombings and attacks.
Despite our recent and proven record of aiding and
defending innocent Muslims in Kuwait, the Balkans, and elsewhere, we have been singled out as a Satan, a nation of sub-human infidels, and been the target of slander and incitement to murder that would have shamed the most fanatical Jesuit in the Spanish Inquisition.

There are those of us who have the courage to actually
listen to their unedited rhetoric, view the video
records of their atrocities, and face the fact that
these people are sworn to kill as many innocent
civilians as they possibly can. Some of us, in the
months since September 11th, 2001, have chosen to take
them at their word.

So let us gather the moral courage to take a factual, cold-hearted look at the reasons why this war with Iraq is the necessary next step in this conflict; one that needs to be undertaken without delay.


First, and most importantly, we can plainly state the
prima facie cause that makes up our first argument in
favor of invasion:

1. The impending military action is not the
pre-emptive opening of hostilities against a sovereign
nation, but rather the continuation of hostilities
began by Iraq in 1990 with their invasion of Kuwait;
said resumption being a direct result of repeated and
flagrant violations of the ceasefire signed by Iraq in
1991.

So much for the 'pre-emptive' attack criticism. This
upcoming military action is indeed the product of a
pre-emptive attack on a sovereign nation...that nation
being Kuwait. Saddam Hussein took his country to war
in a naked grab for oil and glory. He was handed the
worst military defeat in modern history, a defeat so
complete and total that US forces began to hesitate to
fire on Iraqi units that were so spectacularly and
completely routed.

The United States acquiesced to international law in
the form of the UN resolution limiting military action
to the removal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The Iraqi
leader, facing complete and total defeat, entered into agreements as a condition of ceasefire, and has failed at every turn to honor those agreements, bringing his country to ruin and starvation by doing so.

It's really just that simple.

Second, the current resolution is clearly worded so
that the burden of proof regarding disarmament is on
Iraq, and not on the success of the weapons
inspectors. UN 1441 makes it clear that anything less
than full and complete cooperation - this means things
like meeting us at the airport and handing over the uranium-enrichment centrifuges that we know they have - is a material breach of UN1441 and will be met by "serious consequences" (and we should perhaps rename the Nimitz the USS Serious Consequences.)

So:

2. Failure to turn over known WMD components, and not
the failure of UN Inspectors to find them, puts Iraq
in material breach of UN Resolution 1441 and
authorizes the US and her allies to enforce previous
UN resolutions by means of military force.

So much for the legal niceties. Now let's get down to
brass tacks.



On Tuesday, September 11th, 2001, the United States
was suddenly and deliberately attacked by forces of
Islamic extremism in an act of barbarity that stunned
the world.

In order to grasp the full meaning of that attack, we
would do well to change our terminology to better
reflect the reality we face. We should be thinking and discussing the upcoming conflict not as the War on Iraq, but as the Battle of Iraq. For it is indeed
that: a major - hopefully, the major - battle against
Islamic fundamentalism and the tactic of terrorism
that they have employed against the US and others in
their rage and shame at their own manifest failures.

Let us then examine the evidence and motivation that
firmly places Iraq as the key component in an alliance
of terror directed against the West in general and the
United States in particular.

We should begin by having the honesty and integrity to
admit that the direct connections between Iraq and Al
Qaeda prior to the events of 9/11 are tenuous and
murky at best. We should also acknowledge that despite
feverish claims to the contrary, Saddam Hussein is a totalitarian dictator exclusively concerned with his own power and in no way is he the Muslim Saladin he makes himself out to be. It does indeed seem likely that Osama bin laden and Saddam detest and hate each other (and soon we shall be able to refer to both of them in the past tense.) But to say that this is enough to prevent them from allying themselves against the United States is self-delusion of the highest order.

For the full horror of a terrorist nuclear attack upon
the United States to come to fruition, our enemies
need both the means to produce an atomic bomb and a
delivery system for it.

Anyone who doubts the willingness and ability of Al
Qaeda to deploy and use such a weapon has frankly not
been paying attention and is unworthy of this debate.
They have, in public statements, on web sites, in
training videos and operations manuals, shown a
persistent and desperate attempt to obtain such a
weapon. We have only to look back to that clear blue
morning should we have any doubt whatsoever that such
people would do everything in their power to kill as
many of us as possible. Let us not forget that without
the heroism and professionalism of our police and
firemen, and the most well-managed, successful
emergency evacuation in history, that death toll that
day could have easily reached twenty or thirty
thousand. There is a great deal of evidence that other
teams, both here and abroad, were thwarted by the
quick grounding of the commercial fleet by the FAA.
Who knows how many others might have been killed that
day, and where? Or how many unsung victories we have
won in the months since that terrible day?

A small nuclear device can be fit into a suitcase. We
need to face the stark, brutal fact that in a free
society there is no defense against such a weapon.
This war cannot be won, and our cities and people
saved from nuclear annihilation, by playing defense.

Fortunately, constructing a nuclear weapon is not
easy. In fact, it took the United States the better
part of several years and billions of 1940's dollars
to construct an operational nuclear device, using the
full resources of the world's richest nation and the
best theoretical and practical minds on the planet.

Not only must the bomb maker gets his or her hands on
large quantities of a rare and tightly controlled
substance - uranium or plutonium - they must also
overcome huge engineering problems in terms of
hardened materials and exquisitely timed explosions
needed to implode the fissile material to critical
mass.

A finished nuke can fit in a suitcase, but to build
one takes a factory, indeed, takes a nation: money,
massive equipment, large work areas, armies of
scientists. These things, unlike suitcases, can be
found, targeted and destroyed.

There can be no question whatsoever that Saddam
Hussein has been desperately seeking the means to
build such a weapon. Let's make sure everyone heard
that: There can be no question whatsoever that Saddam
Hussein has been desperately seeking the means to
build such a weapon. Really astonishing piles of
independent records and sources confirm this without
question. From Iraqi defectors who actually had
hands-on experience with the programs, to intelligence
reports of the import of the required equipment and
raw materials, to the reams of evidence that prior
inspectors discovered in their seven years of
investigations, to the unabashed statements of Saddam
Hussein himself... Saddam has brought his country to
ruin for no other reason that his obsession with
owning a nuclear bomb.

Had the Israelis not bombed the Osirak reactor in 1981
(and endured world condemnation for it at the time),
then without question Iraq would have had a nuclear
weapon during the 1991 Gulf War. It is impossible to
imagine a man such as Saddam not using such a weapon
when faced with the greatest defeat in military
history. Whether he used it in a Scud attack on US
troops, to contaminate Kuwaiti or Saudi oilfields, or,
more likely, to use against Tel Aviv to ignite a holy
war against the hated Jews, the result would have been catastrophic, indeed, in the likely case of a nuclear response from Israel, unimaginable.

We can therefore sum up the next argument for
attacking Iraq as follows:

3. Saddam Hussein has the means and the motivation to
develop nuclear weapons, and there is irrefutable
evidence that he has tried to do so. He has shown
staggering errors in judgment and a belief in his own
personal infallibility by attacking Iran, Kuwait, and
Israel. Iraq attaining nuclear capability therefore
provides a potent and immediate threat to our allies
in the region and the vital interests of the United
States.

Like all dictators, Saddam runs a state apparatus
ruled by fear. There is no one in his military command structure, or indeed among his party or even his sons, who are willing to give him real information, because most of that information will be bad news. This, coupled with his clinical paranoia and narcissism, have led him to absolutely appalling errors in judgment, such as assuming the Iranian people would join him in his war with Iran, the miscalculation over Kuwait in 1990 and the subsequent evasion of his obligations in the years since.

Furthermore, the people who have had first-hand
contact with Saddam Hussein all speak of his messianic
complex. He cares not a whit about world opinion, and
indeed seems preoccupied with how the people --
particularly the Arabs -- of 500 years hence will
record him. Saddam, to put it plainly, plans to make a
big splash on the pages of world history. In this he
is no different than Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot. There
are no legal or behavioral inhibitions on
totalitarians such as Saddam. He does whatever he
wishes, and every action is met by terrified praise
and false adulation from a population cowering in
fear.

Therefore, it is not only likely but probable that
Saddam will be tempted to use such weapons to strike
back at those who have committed the unthinkable crime
of embarrassing him before the world. And this is
where Al Qaeda can provide him with not only the
delivery mechanism, but also, to Saddam's irrational
and misinformed mind, a form of plausible deniability.
His success with The Big Lie these past 11 years has
emboldened him to believe - with ample justification -
that there are legions of useful idiots ready to rally
to the defense of anyone who dares attack America.

So we may summarize our fourth cause as follows:

4. Saddam Hussein shows irrefutable signs of mental
impairment in the form of Clinical Paranoia and
Narcissistic Disorder. Given control of nuclear or
other weapons of mass destruction, his temptation to
use them against the US on American soil is not
mitigated by normal behavioral inhibitors, and indeed
is amplified by his aberrant mental state. This poses
a potent, immediate and intolerable threat to the
safety and security of the people of the United
States.

A close corollary to this argument can be made from
the fact that Saddam routinely tortures, murders and
gasses his own people. We may disagree violently with
the Chinese, the Russians, the Pakistanis and the
French, among others, but we do not unduly fear
nuclear attack from such nations because each of them
can be deterred by the unimaginable rain of
destruction we would unleash upon them in return.

A self-absorbed Narcissist such as Saddam does not see
people - even his own people - the way we do. They are
objects to men like Saddam, props and extras the
enhance the panoply and glory of their lives. Brave
German generals disobeyed Hitler's orders to destroy
everything that remained intact in Germany during the
final weeks of the Third Reich. Like all dictators, he
saw the impending end of his own life as the final
curtain on his nation's history...and what happened to
the extras in his biopic was completely irrelevant.

Saddam has taken the cradle of civilization, one of
the most enlightened and educated populations in the
middle east, and driven it to utter ruin in the
service to his own vainglorious ambitions. The money
designated to feed and care for his people under the
UN sanctions he has used to build mad palaces of
sickening opulence under the noses of his starving
children. And yet there are those that say the threat
of reprisal against his nation is sufficient to keep
him in line.

Nonsense. Saddam has to die someday. And when he goes,
he clearly means to take whatever he can with him.
Therefore:

5. Saddam has repeatedly shown his contempt and bitter disregard for the welfare of his own people. He has totally neglected all of the misery they have endured since his ascension to power, and is therefore undeterrable and immune to fear of reprisal against his nation and his people.

No one disputes that nuclear weapons are dangerous. No
one disputes that Saddam is dangerous. So why do
legions of people argue that Saddam with nuclear
weapons is somehow not dangerous?



Those, as I see them, are our primary causus belli.
Now let's deal with some of the reasons why people
oppose this war.

Innocent people, innocent children will die in this
war.

That is true. Innocent people will die at our hand.
But let us never forget that action is visible and
direct, but that inaction also bears consequences.

We will do everything in our power to limit civilian causalities in this war. In fact, during the days and weeks ahead, we will see something unheard of in military history: a campaign designed not only to minimize civilian casualties, but one aimed at killing as few enemy soldiers as possible. We have already dropped leaflets on Iraqi regular army units, telling them that if they remain in their positions they will not be harmed, but if they mass for a counterattack, we will destroy them. As Steven Den Beste repeatedly has pointed out, they have recent experience in this matter, both with our destructive capabilities and our generosity and kindness to prisoners of war.

Those that do chose to fight will be the hard core
element of Saddam's blood-stained police state, the
sadists and executioners who have tortured and
murdered their own people on Saddam Hussein's orders
for decades. Don't forget that. Don't forget the
number that have disappeared in the night during his
monstrous reign of terror. Don't forget
well-documented, disgustingly common accounts of the
children tortured to death in front of their parents,
of girls raped in front of their fathers, not to
mention the roll-calls of horror that will emerge when
that evil is finally swept away.

And finally, don't forget your friends and family, the
good people you work and play with, the innocent men
women and children of New York or Los Angeles or
Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Boston, or whichever city we
may condemn to radioactive vapor because we were too
cowardly and indecisive to act on what we knew to be a
threat.


We have thousands of nuclear weapons...it's hypocritical
to say Iraq can not have them also.

We have had nuclear weapons for almost sixty years
now. They have been used, twice, within the first days
of that ownership to end the most horrible war in
history and prevent many times the number of
casualties, on both sides, that would have been lost
had the war continued through the invasion of Japan.
Despite many provocations, they have not been used
since then. We have had Chemical weapons for even
longer.

Saddam, on the other hand, used his chemical weapons
the instant he got his hands on them: first on the
Iranians and then on his own Kurds - this after not
once being used by any nation in the desperate six
decades between 1920 through 1980. What does that tell
you?

Many adults are given alcohol, credit cards,
automobiles, guns and jet aircraft, once they have
shown themselves worthy of the responsibility. We do
not put these things in the hands of four year olds,
and with very good reason. It may seem hypocritical to
you; to me, the idea of keeping a drunken
second-grader from waving around a loaded automatic
while behind the controls of a hurtling 747 just makes
sense.

This war is all about oil.

Demonstrably false for the reasons listed above.
Nevertheless, let's grant the premise. Oil is the only
power source currently available to meet the needs of
our post-industrial society. Not only our automobiles
depend on this oil: it is also a primary source of
electrical energy in this country, and is essential to
the plastics we use in everything from MRI machines to
CD players.

To say this war is all about oil is factually
identical to saying that this war is all about
maintaining our society and lifestyle. If that is not
worth fighting for, what is? One may find that
offensive ideologically, but my experience with the
people who have SPLIT WOOD NOT ATOMS on their bumper
stickers have actually split very little wood in their
lives. If one feels deeply about NO BLOOD FOR OIL, you
must either drive a solar-powered electric car, ride a
horse or a bicycle, or walk. You must remove your home
from the city power grid. You must discard all plastic
items. You must also abandon television, radios and
movies, all of which rely on electricity generated by
oil. You must forgo modern medicine, surgery and
dentistry, likewise driven by oil-fired electricity at
many stages. You must grow your own food.

Do all of these things, and you will have my frank
admiration for your dedication to a moral cause. Do
anything less and you are a hypocrite mouthing an easy
lie in an attempt to strike a pose of moral
superiority.

We need a 'smoking gun' from the UN inspectors.

It is clear from documented reports of bribery
attempts on UN Inspectors on the part of the Iraqis,
to French inspectors tipping off Saddam about team destinations, that to accept this argument we de facto lose the game. This is why it is so popular. It ignores reams of testimony from defecting scientists, and all of the other evidence stated above. In fact, it raises the question that ignoring such a mountain of existing evidence requires such a willful burying of one's head in the sand as to make any proof insufficient. To such people, the smoking gun they require is a pile of radioactive rubble where Tel Aviv once stood, or legions of dead commuters in the London Underground, or the wildfire spread of smallpox through greater Chicago and beyond. Scores of independent sources repeatedly and emphatically demonstrate that Iraq has massive quantities of biological and chemical weapons, and is working frantically to attain nuclear ones.

Those unconvinced by the existing evidence will be
convinced by nothing less than their actual use
against our military or civilians.

To hell with those people.

And finally,

The United States has no right to launch a pre-emptive
attack; we can only respond if we are attacked.

This is the most pernicious and dangerous argument of
all, because it plays directly into our natural
revulsion at being an aggressor and causing the deaths
of innocent civilians.

As I mentioned, I see both Iraq's attack on Kuwait,
and the Islamicist attacks on 9/11, as the pre-emptive
attacks that started this pending conflict. But
perhaps you do not buy that argument. Well, consider
this:

We were attacked before, on December 7th, 1941, by a
vast navy that had been assembling for years. We
watched the Japanese build the Pearl Harbor fleet. We
did nothing. We - the French and English especially -
also did nothing as a bitter and vengeful Germany grew
stronger and more daring. Appeasement was all the rage
back then.

In the years following that naval sneak attack, and
after a war in which unchecked militarism nearly
brought civilization to ruin, it made sense to think
that we could stay free by being strong enough to
deter or repel any invasion. We would do - indeed, we
have done - whatever it took to create a defense so
formidable that the mere idea of defeating it has
become unthinkable, and to willingly provoke it
becomes an act of state suicide.

Those days are gone.

We face an enemy willing - eager - to carry a suitcase
into Times Square, press a button, and in one
millisecond inflict more casualties on the United
States than we have seen in all the wars of our
history, combined.

It is an image so horrible that many simply refuse to
believe it.

Believe it.

We ignore September 11th at our mortal peril. We no
longer have the luxury of watching an enemy build
military and naval strength over years or decades. We
no longer face uniformed divisions massing at the
borders. We face instead a group of depraved murderers
to whom nothing is off-limits, who fear no earthly
retribution, who love and glorify death for its own
end and who hate not only all that we do, but all that
we are with a black bitterness that we cannot begin to
imagine.


I believe we are standing at a doorway in history,
squinting at forms we can barely make out in a dark
room. We will, in the years to come, look at the
confusion and doubt of the present hour as a turning
point in the history, and indeed the identity, of our
nation and ourselves.

For we are waking up to a simple reality. In a new
millennium where a few diseased people can carry a
suitcase with the power to kill millions, the lesson
we must learn is simply this: the only way we will be
safe, prosperous and free is when everyone is safe,
prosperous and free.

Critics of this War on Terror call it 'eternal' and 'never-ending' as a means of discouraging us from fighting it at all.

But there can be an end to this war. It will end when
all people are inside the bubble we have built for
ourselves and our children - warm, well-fed, free to
pursue their dreams and ambitions, their minds and
bodies and women liberated, racial and tribal hatreds
put aside, and so on.

The quiet idealist deep inside in me, on a
speak-when-spoken-to basis, actually believes such
things are possible. After all, it works -- pretty
well -- for us, and we Americans are children of all
the world. We know what such a society looks like, and
we have documents of such stunning clarity and hope as
to show anyone the way.

The conservative I have become, however, is certain
that if it happens, it will happen because of the
actions and sacrifice of US Marines and not because of middle-aged naked hippies spelling PEACE on a golf course. It will take decades. It may take centuries.

Can we FORCE freedom and democracy on people? It
seems, from the example of Germany and Japan, that
indeed we can. These societies once harbored fanatics
no less dedicated to our destruction than the ones we
face today. Now they are our trading partners, and
often our friends and allies. The point at which it
becomes necessary to force such a regime change will
be determined by how ugly the swamp has become. And
can anyone seriously argue that the people left after
the defeat of the Nazis, Japanese Imperialists or
American Confederates are not far better off today
than they would have been if they had WON?

I am not an ideologue in this regard, and I certainly
don't want to send our sons and daughters out to fight
and die for anything less than our safety and
survival. But that, to me, is looking like what it
might come to. Each success makes the next case
easier, and each triumph further shames and silences
our critics.

Sixty years ago, we were willing to sacrifice millions
of American soldiers, sailors airmen and marines to
keep our homeland safe. Such a task may be before us
today. With our soldiers' skill, training and
professionalism, and our unparalleled technical
innovation and creative genius, we will not need
anything like millions of soldiers. But it will not be
free - it will only be necessary.

In this, I am guardedly optimistic due to our recent
victory in Afghanistan. Not the military victory,
magnificent though it was.

No, I am thinking of things like the reopening of
their soccer stadium, the field where I have seen --
thorough the camera obscura of the internet -- women
in burqas forced to kneel and then shot through the
back of the head for the crime of adultery. Kids play
football there again. That's a win, Noam Chomsky, you
lying son of a biatch.

Little girls march to school in the morning, singing.
That's a win, Robert Fisk. Old men wept as the Afghan
national flag was carried by an actual Afghan army
during their first free National Day in two
generations. That is a win for the Good Guys, too,
Harold Pinter. I hear of Special Forces sergeants
organizing little league teams and I just smile like a
little kid.

I'm smiling because, at last, we have dragged
ourselves back from the mud and filth of the Cold War,
from allying ours

...you break Afghanistan you own it. I love it.

The US seems to have fallen victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is "Never get involved in a land war in Asia", but only slightly less well known is this - "Never go in against a Sicilian, when death is on the line!"

wh0mp out.

If only it would happen that way. We could then nuke em all and then have the oil for ourselves and no more dirty, smelly, disgusting, pig raping, muslims.

Nice. I bet mommy would be proud.

Who wrote that

I meant that long thing by Hielo

feh, face it, you all believe your position is right, and nobody is going to change that (except maybe some well placed propaganda), so quit yer yappin and argue about something more important than some flash animation, GEEZUZ!

Well done Whomp ... inconceivable!

Chrisifa
I think I saw that part in Hielo's post about the Russian getting his throat cut.

Unsettling.

Hielo - Aaak.

1. a href is your friend.
2. What a weird acid trip of a post. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes clumsy, and sometimes creepy. A lotta pretentiousness, but you can hardly avoid that when yer going for profundity.
3. Very, very hard to whack to.