Originally posted by mikhael
I find it interesting that you trot out the nuclear threat, when nothing of the kind has yet been found. Show me the nuclear weapons and we can start to consider Saddam an actual nuclear threat. Hell, show me the chemical and biological weapons.
As for the rest, you're saying that any country can invade Israel.
Israel has all but come out and stated they have nuclear weapons. They show a willingness to assassinate people--and are proud of it. A willingness to deploy gunships and fighter jets at civilians combined with nuclear weapons sounds more than a bit dangerous to me. At what point do you consider them a threat? At what point do you start rolling the tanks?
By invading Iraq on a flimsy pretext that the rest of the civilized world saw through from the first, the US has shown a willingness to trample the rights of other nations, international law, and the will of the international community. It has displayed a willingness to bomb indiscriminately (witness US Army multiple warhead delivery systems and their 40-60% dud rate). To date, the US is still the only country in the entire world to have actually deployed a nuclear device--and that at a civilian target, not a military one. At what point do you consider the US a threat? At what point do you start rolling the tanks?
I just don't see how you can use that line of rhetoric so glibly. Its so easy to apply to any country, any situation. Its so flexible and easy. It doesn't need actual accountability. It only needs suspicion and rumor.
I have to agree with mikhael here. I understand that this is a post 9/11 world and that it is necessary to strike at terrorists before they can carry out their plots of killing as many innocent civilians as they can. After all, they make no distinction between American civilians and american military targets. However, pre-emption as an overall strategy is
very dangerous just for the reasons that mikhael stated: it doesn't need accountability. You don't have to present proof of an imminent threat to start a war. All you have to do is say "Hey, we THINK these people are getting ready to attack us, so let's attack them first."
How the hell does that work? If you're in a bar and you think somebody is about to throw a punch at you so you throw the first punch instead, all that does is get you prosecuted for assault. If you throw the first punch, you're gulity of assault (and battery if you actually hit the other guy).
Of course, we are dealing with terrorists, who have no sense of propriety or legality, so I can see Sandwichs side of the argument as well. But is it morally right to start wars just on assumptions and unproven intelligence? With the standard the Bush administration uses, how can we know that their intelligenc is of any real credibility? Before and during the beginning of the war, Bush kept saying there were nuclear (or "nucular," to use his pronunciation
) weapons ready to be deployed against the US. Well, guess what? A nuclear weapons program is EXTREMELY hard to hide because of all the infrastructure needed to create such a weapon (storage units, cooling units, finding weapons grade nuclear material and so on). We haven't even found any evidence of chemical or biological weapons, which are significantly easier to produce than nuclear weapons.
Bush kept saying over and over again that the threat was "imminent." It wasn't.
And then there's the fact that the Bushies shut our traditional allies out of contracts to help rebuild Iraq. France, Germany and Russia were all shut out of the bidding for these contracts for, the Bush administration claimed, "reasons of security." Excuse me? How is a contract to rebuild Iraq's electricity grid awarded to a German company (rather than to, say, Halliburton) a threat to American security? Dudes, this is plain for everyone to see: Bush shut our traditional allies out of the bidding because they didn't support the war in Iraq, plain and simple. Net result to the American taxpayer:
we wind up footing the bill for rebuilding Iraq, rather than spreading the cost among the international community.
Enjoy those tax cuts, peeps! They won't last long! This sort of spiteful behavior will just keep pissing off our friends and allies simply because it's so blatant. Who wants to help and ally with a nation that behaves like a spoiled brat?
With his credibility stretched so far past the snapping point, how can we trust Bush the next time he says we have to start a new war to protect ourselves? How can we trust him when he says anything?
I wouldn't feel so bad about pre-emption if I actually trusted the guy doing the pre-empting. Needless to say, for all of the above reasons (and more), I don't trust Bush. Go figure.
