I knew I shouldnt have ever got involved in this conversation while I was at work between calls. Let me take a few min to clarify what I typed in a haste earlier.

Heres how I feel about the whole situation: The war was wrong for many reasons. We had no proof to go in there. No one else wanted us to go in (dont say Blair did, he's Bush's bitch). There would be far too many civilian deaths and there already have been. It's going to cost America TRILLIONS of tax dollars and now the rest of the world is going to jump on the anti-american bandwagon.

Now lets go in depth with that a little bit:

1)We had no proof. We still dont have proof. Odds are most likely, we will never have proof. I have more WMD in my kitchen in the forms of cleaning chemicals than Saddam has in all of Iraq, possibly. Without that proof, how are we going to look? How is our "president" going to look in front of the whole world? There went about 200 years of American policy about "not striking first" right out the door.

2)We all saw for weeks and weeks how many people around the world were against this war. The leaders of many nations were against it. Hell, even the Pope was against it! That says something when the Pope steps in and gives an opinion about anything. The majority of Americans (you know, the ones who didnt vote for him the first time) were against this war. Unfortunately, no one in our great democratically elected govt really gave a damn.

3)There have been so many deaths in Iraq over the last decade. True, Saddam and his henchment were royal dicks and did some horrible things, but the main killer of these civilians (until the last 2 months) have been starvataion and lack of medicine due to economic sanctions instead of bombs.There were many other courses of action to help Iraqi people. I only bring this up because Bush's focus will soon be "freeing the Iraqi people" instead of WMD.

4)This war is going to cost the American taxpayer what? I think the last figure was around $8 BILLION for the first month of war and occupation. $8 BILLION!! Do you know how many school's we can build here in FL to ease overcrowding? With $8 BILLION we can finally balance the ****ing budget perhaps? 8 years of Clinton and RECORD economic stability and now 2 years into Emperor Bush's reign and $8 Billion into a war and a defecit instead of surplus like we had before. Perhaps we should just pay for this out of the Bush family's pocketbook? If you can buy the presidency, I'm sure you can afford to conquer Iraq.

5)Now ... do you ever stop to think about WHY the rest of the world hates America? Think about what we've done to the rest of the world for the last 60 years. Have we forgotten 1953 how we overthrew the democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadeq of Iran and installed a dictator in his place? How about in the mid 50's when we went into Guatemala? We overthrew their leader as well, and almost half a million civilians died in the process. 1963 we assasinated the president of South Vietnam. How about the coup we staged in South America in 1973 to remove the president of Chile and put Augusto Pinochet in charge? I guess we also forgot the Afghan-Russian war in which the CIA funded Osama Bin Laden and his fellow "freedom fighters" as Regan put it to kill the Soviets? They later used that incredible training for you know what. After that we gave BILLIONS to Saddam and WMD to fight Iran. He was probably pretty pissed off to find out how we were helping them as well. When Iraq invaded Kuwait the first time (unprovoked as you put it which is true) they were using weapons WE gave to them. Yep. Bush the 1st put another dictator in charge after we won that war. Before we wanted Bin Laden for the 9/11 tragedy, we were friends of the Taliban. We gave them over $250M in aid hoping to get a pipeline for oil put through there. Now we put the Northern Alliance in charge which seem to be a bit more brutal than the Taliban ever were.

So do I think Bush should be impeached? I dont know at this point to be honest. He can be but like its been stated earlier, he wont be convicted of anything. I'm glad Dubya's watchin out for me.

 

this is the main point of yours that i want to dispute. the people of iraq were not starving because of the economic sanctions imposed by the UN by any means. the people were starving so that Saddam Hussein could live in the lap of luxury and keep his war machine running. saying that the sanctions caused the starvation of millions is just plain ignorance.

secondly, on this point i would like to state that you are giving old Billary Clinton way more credit than he is due. the left always give him credit for the dot-com boom which sent the economy swinging for the fences. this is not the case at all. that "RECORD economic stability" that you preach about in fact had little or nothing to do with Billary or his budget and had everything to do with the introduction of internet stocks and the bandwagon buying of them on wall street into an already growing market.

thirdly, the presidency wasn't bought. it's ridiculous to think that. did you not watch the TV the day after election day? GW was the clear winner in all of the states he took except for Florida, which was riding the fence. CNN also reported these figures before any absentee ballot had been counted. now, you live in tampa right? then i'm sure you're aware of and familiar with the general consensus of the military presence in Tampa, considering Macdill Air Base is where CENTCOM is located(which is a major military command for those of you not well versed on these things). now, before the absentee votes were counted, Florida was riding the fence. after they were counted GW was the clear winner even after Tipper... i mean Al Gore's multiple requests for a recount(which was shameless and the act of a sore loser IMO). reason being is that it's well known that Mr. Gore has no love lost for the military. the majority of the people in the armed services are not so fundamentally stupid as to vote themselves out of a job. i don't think there are many that would. they voted for who they thought was best for them and their families. it's just the use of simple common sense.

personally i think that GW has played a damn fine hand with what he was dealt. in his first year in office he was faced with a terrorist attack that Billary and the majority of the rest of our former presidents (with the exception of FDR with pearl harbor)never had to deal with. that same terrorist attack was targeted at the two structures that was THE focal point of our pre 9/11 economy. the aftermath of which bankrupted things such as airlines that, before were part of the backbone of our thriving economy, and sent us reeling into a recession that this country and the rest of the world economy will feel for the next 20 years in some way or another. the effects of that attack are not just death, destruction, and chaos for a few moments like the left would have you believe through arguments such as this. to blame the man in charge for things that were beyond his control in any way, shape, or form is simply proposterous IMHO.

 

I dont think Saddam is living the life of luxury because his people didnt have medicine, my friend. As stated by FCNL letter to congress on 3/02:

End the inhumane economic sanctions immediately. The U.S.-led UN economic sanctions have violated both international humanitarian and U.S. law by harming civilians as a means to coerce action by a government. The sanctions have harshly punished the people of Iraq for the actions of an oppressive regime over which they have no control. Tens of thousands have died from curable and preventable diseases due to the lack of adequate nutrition, medical supplies, clean water, and sanitation. The end result of this eleven-year U.S.-led policy is a generation of civilians without hope.


The people of Iraq are denied BASIC things for daily lives. We're not talking about FOOD and medicine alone. Now I'm no expert on weapons inspections, economic sanctions, terror outfits or the ergonomics of public toilets. But when I see a list of all the things Iraq can't import on grounds that they might have a "dual use," my built-in bullshit detector gets kind of fidgety.

Take pencils. The schoolchildren in Iraq can't use pencils because some genius in Bush Senior's administration figured that pencils contain lead, and lead can be used in a nuclear weapons programme. My ass.

Someone needs to clear up what pencil lead actually is. It's not the element Lead (or plumbum), it's just finely-ground clay and graphite (an allotropic form of Carbon), mixed with water and pressed into thin rods at high temperatures. It's called lead because the Brits who first discovered graphite believed they'd found lead. Just like the Brits who first discovered Oasis believed they'd found the next Beatles. And see what came of that nuisance.

Last I checked, Lead was supposed to stop a nuclear reaction from getting out of hand, not accelerate it. That's why they use Lead plates as moderators in a nuclear reactor, and Lead suits to work in places with high levels of radiation. Using Lead in a nuclear weapons programme is like using blotting paper as a sexual lubricant (maybe there's an idea there).

Another reason given for banning pencils is that Hussein's henchmen could swoop down on classrooms across the country, filch the damn things (it's mine! no, shut up it's mine! no, you shut up!) and extract the Carbon from them and use it to coat their Soviet-era planes and make them invisible to radar. That's a stealth bomber for the cost of a pencil case, compared to the $1.5 billion that the U.S. spends on each B-2 bomber -- some of which have been known to get shot down over Yugoslavia by peasants with names like Zoltan Bercik. In these times of recession, I think that's a pretty strong case for buying unbranded goods.

More than 14 billion pencils are produced in the world every year, enough to circle this planet 62 times. Imagine the possibilities.

Okay, how about this? Chlorine, an essential ingredient of any half-assed water purification plant, is banned. It's banned because Hussein could use it in a chemical weapons programm. My ass.

Chlorine was last used in 1919 by the British, French and German forces (not Iraq), and by the end of WW1 over a million soldiers had choked on their own vomit, most of them dying because the breeze turned back on them instead of drifting at a leisurely 5mph towards the enemy.

This technology is 83 years old, more jaded than Maggie Thatcher, and we're expected to believe that Hussein is about to use it. Even if he does resort to such cutting-edge chemical warfare (instead of the stocks of sarin and tabun that were supplied to him by a succession of Western governments), the Ammonia in urine can neutralize the chemicals used in Chlorine gas. In plain English, that means you can neuter a cloud of Chlorine gas by pissing into a handkerchief and holding it to your face. We have seen the remedy, and it is us.

The same Western governments targeted Iraq's water-purification and sewage-treatment plants in 1991 and 1998. Over the past eleven years, an average of 200 children have died every day of what should be treatable diseases: simple diarrhoea, typhoid, dysentery and other water-borne illnesses. Lack of clean water might just have been the biggest killer in Iraq since the sanctions were imposed.

But Chlorine is still banned.

Next, we've got X-Ray machines. That's right, the same gizmos your friendly neighborhood clinic uses to locate cervical cancer and ovarian cysts.

The Security Council consistently blocks X-Ray machines, claiming their Cesium isotopes (as well as their on-board computers) could be used in a nuclear weapons programme. My ass.

Screw the Cesium and on-board computers, I'll tell you what you really need to build a nuclear bomb: weapons-grade Plutonium and enriched Uranium -- the first of which is just about as abundant as heterosexuals in a gay pride parade on Old Compton Street.

As for enriched Uranium, it's easy-peasy. In fact, as David Hahn (a 15-year-old boy scout from Michigan) discovered in 1995, it takes as little as an amalgam of Americium-241 (commonly found in smoke detectors), Thorium-232 (commonly found in gas lantern filaments), and Radium (commonly found in old alarm clocks), bombarded constantly with a home-made neutron gun, to produce enriched Uranium.

In other words, banning X-Ray machines in order to jeopardize Hussien's nuclear weapons programme is about as effective as banning cigarette lighters in order to get people to quit smoking.

Do I think Hussein could find a dual use for X-ray machines? I don't know, but as ABC's Mid-East correspondent Mark Willacy remarked after visiting one of the sites suspected of developing nuclear weapons, "there can't be nuclear scientists here because there were instructions in the bathroom on how to flush the toilet."

Iraq's geeks don't know how to flush the toilet. They're compelled to sell their books so they can buy food for the family. And they don't know how to extract enriched Uranium from a couple of smoke detectors, gas lanterns and alarm clocks.

Meanwhile, the 300 tonnes of depleted Uranium ammunition used against Iraq in 1991 still lies scattered across the country, contaminating the air, the earth, the water, the vegetation, the livestock. All of which causes leukaemia, lung cancer, bone cancer, respiratory diseases, and a breakdown of the immune system amongst thousands and thousands of Iraqi civilians. Stuff that could easily be traced on an X-Ray machine.

But X-Ray machines are banned because Western governments think these will be used to build nuclear weapons. My ass.

Since you're so versed in the way the modern ballot is counted then, I'm sure you're aware that it doesnt matter HOW many states you get, it matters WHICH states you get. I'm sure NY has more weight to it than VT for example?

 

This thread has gone right down the shitter. What doesn't help is your cutting and mindlessly pasting someone else's work just to make a point. You should at least give credit to the author, because you'll at least have an out when someone wants to challenge you.

 

I agree 100%...he obviously copied and pasted it. Unless he spells program 'programme', which I somehow doubt.

Use your own words :slap:

 

That wasn't his point at all. He took enough states to win the electoral college, minus Florida. And he took them by a wide margin in most cases. Same with Gore. But Bush won in Florida.

 

That was an essay I found online in text format that didn't have the author. If I had it, believe me, I wouldve supplied the name. How is it mindlessly when you want to talk about sanctions in Iraq and thats what he's also talking about. How about instead of bitching about the fact that someone else said it, argue it? Just like you Republicans to change topic. Either way, the point has been made.

 

Let me know when you want to know who this college dropout is. He was not difficult to find...at all.

"Sanctions in Iraq" is not the original topic! It's mindless when all you do is look for something to copy and paste, in an attempt to make your point. It takes no original thought. Sure, I'd debate you on your interpretations and ideas, but neither I, nor others (I'm sure), want to waste time arguing about someones else's ideas.

Actually, this thread was doing quite well until YOU changed the topic to what effect the UN sanctions may be having on IRAQ. All other posts tended to keep with the original discussion.

The only point made here is that it takes no brainwork whatsoever to fill up a thread. All you need to know is "ctrl-c" and "ctrl-v".

 

How are we arguing the 2000 election now? If you can't get on with life since then, there's no hope for you.

 

Talking about off topic? Look at 98CoupeV6 talking about Germany and WW2? Fastball talking about WW1 and then how we defeated communism? Then you, yourself (dislike) prompted the discussion about a small comment made earlier about economic sanctions.



It was Blackmagicks Republican attempt to counter:

4)This war is going to cost the American taxpayer what? I think the last figure was around $8 BILLION for the first month of war and occupation. $8 BILLION!! Do you know how many school's we can build here in FL to ease overcrowding? With $8 BILLION we can finally balance the ****ing budget perhaps? 8 years of Clinton and RECORD economic stability and now 2 years into Emperor Bush's reign and $8 Billion into a war and a defecit instead of surplus like we had before. Perhaps we should just pay for this out of the Bush family's pocketbook? If you can buy the presidency, I'm sure you can afford to conquer Iraq.

I'm personally over the election, but when you live in FL, and you have to put up with his brothers BS (trust me, theres a lot EXAMPLE schloarships were cut that pissed me off), you tend to think "man, thats so convienent that it was FL having all those problems".

You guys are wondering why I responded to something you origionally posted and then saying I'm off topic. I was wanting to stay out of this conversation until an off topic comment about WW1 in the first place!