Widem

No, I would not have had us go to war if we knew they had no weapons of mass destruction.

Rinion

Wow! I don't know if I should be laughing hysterically or insulted and pissed off,


I'll take option C) send in Trained United States SOLDIERS.

Pretty retarded to think of them as kids, they are someones children but they are grown and knew what they were getting into or at least should of. War is always a possibility and Soldiers fight in war. They always have the choice to refuse to fight and be dishonorably discharged as well.

If we still practiced Conscription I'd agree with you in a heart beat, but we don't.

I can see where you made that mistake though since Muslims have been known to arm children and use them as shock troopers.


Bah, late as ussual. the police line was better =o

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"Before one can identify anything as "gray", one has to know what is black and what is white. In the field of morality, this means that one must first identify what is good and what is evil. And when a man has ascertained that one alternative is good and the other evil, he has no justification for choosing a mixture. " Ayn Rand

Krontak

You know what. Maybe I'm wrong to have this conversation. We should leave this to those that have lost loved ones over there and let them make judgment on if the sacrifice of their children was O.K. for a war, in which the justification for invading was both fabricated and the truth stretched, this includes John McCain and his surge surge surge speeches as if the surge was a justification for what has been one of the greatest military blunders of modern time.

Krontak

Actually, I know of people that enlisted immediately after 9/11 hoping to get some payback thinking some country in the mid-east was about to turn into glass and they could be part of it.

Then John McCain and a bunch of other goons started telling people we need to take out Saddam and the argument slowly grew some legs and then bam, invasion of an oil rich country ensued.

Deson

I would have. It was never about that to me and I thought they fucked up by overselling what was obviously bullshit. Saddam was a problem that proved that sanctions weren't going to work for every problem. With the pressure building up to release the sanctions, the collateral damage mounting and Saddam still unrepentant, there were only ugly solutions to ugly problems.

I opposed the invasion, not because I disagreed with going over there but because I knew they'd fuck it up.

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Widem

This is where you show how much of a self righteous prick you are. These werent some conscripted draft force. These were people who of their own free will and accord signed up to be paid US Military. As far as I'm concerned family members have no more say at all, because well the decision wasn't theirs, the same as it wasnt mine.

Krontak you have a very posioned sense of things, its very very disturbing.

If the truth was fabricated or even strectched from the information that was presented to the American public and even congress, then how could you even blame republicans, you can only blame the person or people who perpetrated the crime. Furthermore Krontak, imagine this. Imagine maybe the evidence wasn't stretched or fabricated. Imagine that the US government and the American people as a whole concluded that, with the evidence they had, Iraq to be a very real threat. Democrats alongside Republicans, hand in hand voting to declare war on another country. No matter how you look at it you can't logically blame one party or another, its literally everyones shit sandwich.

At this point in time all we can do is take where we are currently and make the best course of action.

Widem

I completely understand this approach.

Take a ruler, who mind you had already taken part in a genocide, that will suddenly have much more freedom with what he does militarily.

At what point do we consider something a risk.

At the chance of occurence?
At the point of occurence?
In the aftermath of occurence?

The first route gives us the dissent that we see with the Iraq war.
The second route gives us roughly what happened in Georgia.
The third route gives us the Nazi Holocaust.

All answers are going to be wrong to someone.

Otis

What was the problem?

Which sanctions?

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Rinion

Don't be stupid, its never all right and its never fair for a parent to have to bury their child. Irregardless of the reason for the war and whether the reason for it was right or wrong.

I don't believe it is for the Families of the fallen to judge however. It is left to those remaining in service. Who the hell do we think we are to disrespect the decisions THEY made?
Quit treating them as children that need their parents approval.

If my uncle or any of my three cousins thought that serving and fighting in this war was pointless and wouldn't help people live better lives, American or otherwise, they could and likely would make the choice to quit and go home even if that meant a court marshal and dishonorable discharge.

The only duty I have as a part of their family is to make sure they have somewhere to go should they choose to make that choice. Not make it for them because I am scared to death they will die.

I don't want to loose any more of my family but by god I'll respect their choices.

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"Before one can identify anything as "gray", one has to know what is black and what is white. In the field of morality, this means that one must first identify what is good and what is evil. And when a man has ascertained that one alternative is good and the other evil, he has no justification for choosing a mixture. " Ayn Rand

Deson

All of them and the no-fly zones. With how tight we had our sanctions around them, children were dying because we wouldn't let Iraq import basic things like bleach because of potential dual use. Saddam was still illegally making money but the sanctions utterly destroyed what was left of the country post-Desert Storm. With the death toll mounting, many worldwide and in the West itself were arguing that the sanctions were too cruel and should be dropped.

The problem with sanctions is that they play for two results-- the leader giving a shit about his people and capitulating or the people growing frustrated and uprising. With the Kurds having effective autonomy and the Shiite's remembering how badly they got fucked and abandoned the last major uprising, nothing was happening.

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