Well at least this is proof that Iraq has Al-Qaiada connections.
Well at least this is proof that Iraq has Al-Qaiada connections.
Apparently, I have been declared banished.
Who would you kill? Would you conduct a thorough and just investigation and target only those you knew to be guilty? If so, how?Originally Posted by noname
Yeah, they lost a hundred thousand innocents in the world's only nuclear strike, then they were occupied by soldiers who dramatically increased the nation's crime rate. They then wrote their own pacifist constitution and decided to refrain from armed conflict, for the benefit of their own people and future. Totally because of America, of course.Look at Japan as a result of world war 2, WE HELPED THEM! An Japan is prospering even today...
There are, of course, Al Qaeda operatives in Iraq; there may have been in the past, too - but that has nothing whatsoever to do with the country having "Al Qaeda connections". Event the US intelligence agencies knew there was no actual link between Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda terrorists. If mere presence equates to "connections", then we'd better get on with targetting Spain, France, the UK and the US - not to mention practically every Middle Eastern nation, since there are Al Qaeda operatives present in all of those locations, and more besides.[q=Shadow Nexus]The problem, Big D, is how do you desintegrate the whole group. It's very easy to say it, but every time you get one, two more join. It's like a cancer.Well at least this is proof that Iraq has Al-Qaiada connections.
The ideal thing would be to find peace between our OBVIOUSLY SUPERIOR (:rolleyes2) culture and theirs. How to do that....uh... Habermas wrote a book about it, I think. I should read it.[/q]Yes, demolishing the entire network in a single action would be extremely difficult; it'd take a lot of intensive planning, and while it was being planned, there'd be no nice "victories for freedom" to splash across TV screens. A true settlement to hostilities would be good; however, the current 'batch' of terrorist groups are simply beyond reason. Addressing the idealogical and factual causes that promted their actions would be effective for the future, but it'd do nothing about the current fanatics and their determination to destroy. Negotiation cannot work with them; but localised and destructive wars won't do the job either. One of the only plausible solutions is to remove the threat, then change things to ensure that no-one feels a similar need to fight in the future.
The Japanese pacifist constitution is more or less exactly what General Douglas MacArthur told them to write. At that point, they essentially nodded and smiled whenever he said anything. He would have beaten the <delicious marshmallows> out of any of them if they didn't, too. Franklin Roosevelt labeled him the most dangerous man in America for a reason.
Edit by Kishi: Watch your language.
As for the whole war in general, it's all just a matter of opinion. I mean none of us can truly know what is right or wrong. We just do what we believe is right and wrong and punish/retaliate against those who did wrong.
Much like US soldiers are considered heroes in the US, Iraqi soldiers and militants are heroes in their countries. What I'm tired of is how the media makes those non-military personel killed to be out as heroes. I mean I sympathize with loss of life, but that's like saying if someone were hit by a car and died, they'd be considered a hero too. Not heroes, just people at the wrong place at the wrong time.
What I don't like is how Bush thinks all we have to do is just send more soldiers and everything will be alright. He can send the entire US military and police force and they'd still be outnumbered 5 to 1. That's like putting more bandaids on a broken leg...it's ridiculous. I don't know how they'll resolve this issue, but sending troops after troops just isn't going to cut it...not unless Bush likes more body bags.
"What I don't like is how Bush thinks all we have to do is just send more soldiers and everything will be alright. He can send the entire US military and police force and they'd still be outnumbered 5 to 1. That's like putting more bandaids on a broken leg...it's ridiculous. I don't know how they'll resolve this issue, but sending troops after troops just isn't going to cut it...not unless Bush likes more body bags."
Very good point. THAT is exactly the same mentality that led to the USA's downfall in Vietnam. We may have overwhelming weapons and resources, but we're on the offensive no matter what, and it's almost always easier to fight a battle when you're defending your "home".
Take care all.
Al-Qaeda operatives and Saddam loyalists. If a guy points there gun at you, then there guilty, either you fire back or just say "Hey! Go ahead and shoot me, I dont know if your guilty or not...''Who would you kill? Would you conduct a thorough and just investigation and target only those you knew to be guilty? If so, how?
And about sending more troops, we dont need more troops. We need more Mercenaries.
Much like US soldiers are considered heroes in the US, Iraqi soldiers and militants are heroes in their countries. What I'm tired of is how the media makes those non-military personel killed to be out as heroes. I mean I sympathize with loss of life, but that's like saying if someone were hit by a car and died, they'd be considered a hero too. Not heroes, just people at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Theres a difference between going over there and risking your life, knowing your life expectancy will drop.Then getting hit by a car. They are all heroes, there doing somthing that no one or maybe some of us here got the balls to do. That civilian contractor is a hero for going over there, and trying to help rebuild Iraq. He went there knowing the dangers, and just wanted to make over 160,000 $ on about a 6 month job. He was only 27 and had family and friends. You tell me if he isnt a hero... An yeah are definitions may all be different, but I respect that...
Yeah, but some of these guys didn't choose to go there. I wasn't just referring to that one guy who got beheaded...I was just citing an example. Like David Bloom, he died in Iraq because he had a blood clot sitting in a tank too long. Is he a hero? No, at least not in my definition. But that doesn't make him any less of a man. I never knew David Bloom and I'm sure he's a fine human being, but I don't really consider him a hero.
"Well at least this is proof that Iraq has Al-Qaiada connections."
...there are NOW. See, Saddam's regime didn't put up with Al-Qaeda's crap, because Osama hated Saddam almost as much as he hated the US. Now that the country's been plunged into chaos, Al-Qaeda is free to do send in its operatives and do what it wants.
P-U-P-P-E-T democracy. It's not democracy. That who puts rules to the game is not a gamer: He's an impostor.And whats wrong with democracy in Iraq? Do you think dictatorship is better? Look at Japan as a result of world war 2, WE HELPED THEM! An Japan is prospering even today...
Plus, I am wondering, if USA loves democracy so much and everything is so beautiful, why did they mantain monarchy in Kuwait after the Gulf War? :rolleyes2
I lifted this from theferrett's livejournal and I might as well repost it here:
The actions of both sides are sick and twisted, and we *should* be outraged and appalled by both. I just hope that it *always* comes as a huge shock when Americans are guilty of the level of brutality that went on in Abu Gharib.The Danger of the Single-Standard
You know what always makes headlines? American brutality. If you can dig up pictures of American soldiers raping some boy or American police beating the trout out of a black guy, it'll make world headlines in a second.
People all around the world love to watch American authority figures whuppin' the tar out of people; as an entertainment value, it's somewhere between football and reruns of Baywatch. They watch it and get outraged, pass the photos around, bitch about America on forums and in cafes.
Yet worse things happen every day, don't they? Were people passing around photos from Saddam's torture chambers before we invaded? Of course not. Do worse police beatings happen every day in Africa? Oh, you bet - sometimes those poor suckers don't even survive!
In short, is what happened in the Iraqi prisons that bad, comparatively?
Hell no. There are worse prisons in the world that don't get the PR, and most of the prisoners survived. You want real trauma, listen to some of the escapees from Somalia or any other ethnic genocide. Rape is bad, but some of the tortures you can read about in other lands are so sickly inventive that you won't be able to eat for a day.
But the media doesn't ever talk about that. I mean, some poor bastard just got his head sawed off before a camera! Why doesn't the media talk about the brutality of the Iraqis, the way they shoot and bomb our soldiers, the violence that goes on in the rest of the world?
I'll tell you why: It's because we're the good guys.
Or we're supposed to be, anyway.
In the aftermath of the on-camera decapitation of an American contractor, I've heard a lot of bitching lately about how the Iraqis are animals, and we should just carpet-bomb those barbaric son-of-a-bitches and kill them all.
And you miss the point. America is about justice, and about mercy, and about giving people who really don't deserve it the benefit of the doubt. And when we stray from those principles for any reasons, we lose what makes us special.
I'm going to state a fact that's going to make a lot of lefties uncomfortable, but it's completely true: There's a reason why frontier justice works pretty well, and it's because most of the people who get strung up are bad guys. One of the embarrassing things about Guantanamo Bay - where, if you'll recall, we're holding and torturing prisoners without recourse to lawyers, a trial, or in fact any way of getting out - is that when it looked like the Supreme Court was going to interfere, the Pentagon ordered the release of about a hundred prisoners.
At last count, at least twenty-five of those prisoners have been spotted fighting for the opposition again. It's estimated that as many as sixty of them are back, doing their damndest to put bullets in the brains of American soldiers.
This is embarrassing for the right, because it turns out that actually, the Pentagon has no ****ing clue who's a good guy and who's a bad guy. They release a hundred people, and within two months 25% are recidivists? Not really good odds.
But it's embarrassing for the left, because what we frequently forget is that the people in Guantanamo Bay are mostly bastards. Sure, they've been picked up at random, and sure there are probably a few exceptions in the bunch - but most of 'em are, in fact, enemies of the state. Most of them do hate America, and you wouldn't want to be in a city full of these guys; left to their own devices, they'd probably kill you unless you were a reporter.
They're not nice people. And chances are pretty good that the people in the Iraqi prisons weren't fine, upstanding citizens either. I'm willing to bet they were in prison for a reason, and if you were to rank people on a scale from 1 to 10 - 1 being "Doesn't deserve a beating at all, karmically speaking" and 10 being "Saddam Hussein and Hitler" - the guys who had the funny photos taken of them probably averaged around a 7 or 8.
Which is why the temptation of tit-for-tat is so tempting. It's really efficient, and most of the time when you throw someone in jail for no reason they had it coming. The "Whup 'em all and let God sort 'em out" has a frighteningly high accuracy rate.
But here's the thing you have to understand about America, and one of the reasons why our country was unique: America's justice system was founded on a principle that was absolutely-****ing-unheard of in the world.
It's better to let a guilty man go than it is to jail an innocent man.
You heard me - or rather, you heard our Founding Fathers. They said, "You have to prove they're guilty. You can't just do trout because you think they deserve it, even if they probably do."
And it was ****ing brilliant.
You see, the problem with the "Whup 'Em All" theory is that although it rounds up the guilty, it also scoops up a fair amount of innocents, too. And the innocents get creamed.
Furthermore, the "Whup 'Em All" system is weighted. If you get picked up, there's not a lot you can do to get out. And as has been noted, the WEA system isn't accurate at filtering out mouthy non-criminals, so there's a good chance you can wind up in prison completely at random. The rules are broken.
So considering that you might get thrown into jail for no good reason, why follow the law at all? Why not come up with a WEA system of your own, and just beat whoever you want to?
The WEA system leads to unjustice, which leads to a disrespect for the law, which leads to anarchy. The Founding Fathers were smart enough to see this and said, "You know, even if it's totally unfair sometimes, it's better to be totally unfair to us. The minute innocent people start thinking that the law might **** them over, they're going to completely ignore the rules. The only way to keep civilization in check is to make it fair for everyone, even the utter bastards."
Hence, America birthed a double-standard which stays in place to this day: Everyone gets their fair say. Even the total assholes. It's way better to let an asshole free to get caught again some day than it is to lock up some poor shopkeeper who's going to tell all of his friends, "What's the use?"
Thus, there is a double-standard. When we abandon the WEA theory, we act better than the enemy. We give them a chance they would never have given us... Because it's a smarter and ultimately more stable system.
It's not news when the Iraqis shoot some soldier, because their system has always been about force winning. If you have the most guns, you can shoot anyone you damn well please. You can do whatever the hell you want if you have the power. That's the way it is in most of the world.
But America has always told the world that it's not about force, but about justice. Yeah, the American cops could jail anyone - they have guns, and backup, and support from other cops - but though they have the raw power to do so, they don't have the right. Power is not from a gun, but from the law.
And we walk around, touting this in flaming letters a mile high: We invaded you because we're better than you are. We have a system that works.
That's really news when it breaks down.
And I hear the cries in the background: They hurt us! Go hurt them back! Kill them, we know they're bastards, bomb them all! Except if we do that on a large scale, without proof, we are essentially saying that we should kill you if we think you deserve it and we can get away with it. You don't need a trial, because ****, we all know it's true. And if we kill a couple of innocents along the way? Hell, can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
And if we do that, what's the difference between us and Saddam Hussein except for better troops and a louder PA system?
America is about the system, people. It's about sometimes letting a complete and utter murderer go free because innocents are more important than revenge, and the law is more important than raw strength. Even the bastards in Guantanamo Bay deserve to be treated with respect, and even Osama bin Laden deserves a trial. We forget that at our peril.
Iraq is going to pound the trout out of us. The world media is going to hold every one of our mistakes up to a microscope. And yes, it's unfair.
But I hope the day never comes when American brutality fails to make world headlines. Because if that day ever arrives, then we will have lost in every way that ever really counted.
I can't say I was shocked by Nick Berg's beheading. Appalled, yes, but I knew quite well that news of the prison abuse would provoke groups like Al-Qaida.
One thing I do find interesting, and quite disturbing:
I don't know what to make of current events at all. :SFrom the Baltimore Sun
In an interview yesterday with public radio station WBUR in Boston, Michael Berg said he blames the U.S. government in part for his son's death. If he had not been held incommunicado for nearly two weeks, he could have left Iraq safely, Michael Berg said.
"We could have gotten him out of there before the hostilities escalated," he told the radio station. "I still hold [Rumsfeld] responsible.
"But it goes further than Donald Rumsfeld. It's the whole Patriot Act. It's the whole feeling of this country right now that rights don't matter anymore because there are terrorists about."
Innocent besides the fact that he was stealing Iraqi jobs. But I'm just going to assume that no one here has any idea of what they're talking about as far as what this scandal actually means to the arab world.
No, you just lock them up forever, and can legally decapitate them if you want.Unlike the U.S. who captures them, we dont decapitate them..
WhatWell at least this is proof that Iraq has Al-Qaiada connections.
Because promoting a free market and providing people with jobs is a crime punishable by a slow, painful and gruesome death. Of-course, now I see that he deserved it.Innocent besides the fact that he was stealing Iraqi jobs.
When fighting monsters, be wary not to become one yourself... when gazing into the abyss, bear in mind that the abyss also gazes into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche
The rightful owner of this Ciddie can kiss my arse! :P
You don't seem to take much consideration to how those people see USA at the moment. It's a comparatively safe bet that the victim was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time - an attack of opportunity, if you will. Innocent or not, the act wasn't about him at all, as far as I can tell.
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