Originally posted by Knight Templar
http://www.msnbc.com/news/805226.asp?pne=msn&cp1=1
so bush is basically gonna piss off the entire world (save his "faldero" Blair and israel) jus to remove Saddam. you've all heard this before... but if u shoot him, one of his lil buddies will take charge next, and so on. You'd need to get rid of the entire army.
i don't have a lot of time lately so i haven't been able to read EVERYTHING but am i correct in assuming that basically we want to kill him because he could have weapons hidning under his bed, but won't let us look?
I am by no means saying that Saddam is a good guy, but , i would probably do the same if i were a evil, tyrannical, pyschopathic leader, i would probably do the same. Generally, i think bush is lookin for some nuts to break since we haven't found Osama's corpse. Personally i am also pissed that he isn't dead/confirmed dead but w/e.
didn't the us end up creating the taliban last time they tried to topple a evil regime?
correct me if i am wrong, as always, most of this is before my time and i have a lot of reading to catch up on
KT, you're right that just killing Saddam alone won't solve the problem. His family will probably hold onto power in Iraq if only saddam is neutralized by a sniper's bullet. And they'll still keep going on to try and get weapons of mass destruction even with Saddam gone. so it makes sense to go in full force and take out his whole army in that respect.
That said, I don't, won't and can't support Bush invading Iraq until and unless he manages to build an international coalition of support. Yeah, I agree, Saddam is a bad guy, but Bush seems intent on dragging us into a war just because he thinks its a good idea. Congress and the American people need to debate this out in the open. Bush's word that we need to go to war is simply not enough. Otherwise, all we'll be doing is repeating the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that started Vietnam.
For those of you that don't know about this; President Johnson fabricated a naval incident in the Gulf of tonkin near Vietnam and used that incident (which was a total lie) to start the Vietnam War. Now it seems that Bush is doing pretty much the same thing. People all over the world and in Congress are asking Bush and his Cabinet for evidence that Saddam is now an imminent threat. How does Bush and his Cabinet respond? They all say that we don't need evidence and that we should just trust the President's word!
Sorry, but I'm going to need a little more evidence than that!
Then there's the fact that Al Queda is still out there. We have them on the run, true, but while Al Queda may be down, it's certain that they're not out. Most, if not all of us here at HLP have experience with strategy games, so we all know that only a fool opens up a new war front before his other war fronts are secure. We all know that Al Queda is still an imminent threat today. Osama is still unaccounted for and there are thousands of his cronies still at large. For right now, Iraq is NOT an imminent threat. There is no indication (and Bush hasn't given any evidence to show otherwise) that Saddam is about to get the Bomb. Even if he does, he wouldn't be stupid enough to use it on us, because he knows that if he did, we'd stomp him immediately afterwards, international coalition or no.
Yes, Saddam needs to be taken out, but now is NOT the time. Better to deal with Al Queda first.
Bush is a fool for thinking that he can fight Saddam and Al Queda at the same time and not have serious repercussions in the Middle East as a result.
KT, about the taliban, the US didn't create it, Pakistan helped create it. What happened was that when Russia invaded Afganistan in 1979, the US gave arms to Afgan rebels, known as the mujaheddin. A lot of these guys were islamic fundamentalists, but since they were killing Russians, the US thought it was a good idea to arm these guys. (It was the middle of the Cold war, after all.) Once the Russians finally got kicked out in 1996, the Taliban was the largest group of mujaheddin (and the most radical group) and basically absorbed or killed most of the remaining rival mujaheddin.
During 1996, Pakistan (another hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism) gave support to the Taliban, but the US, once the Russians had been kicked out in that same year, basically decided to stop sending money and aid to Afganistan. The country decended into chaos for a year, then the Taliban took over and imposed a harsh religious order on almost all of Afganistan.
The survivors of the Taliban purge of the rival mujaheddin fled to Northern Afganistan and became the Northern Alliance. As a result, the Taliban wound up controlling 95% of Afganistan until last year when we came in and bombed the **** out of them.
Hope this answers your question, KT.
