w00t i started a debate! lmfao

On the issue of john kerrys war service i dont really see a whopping 4 months as anything impressive. My brother spent an entire year in iraq but i wouldnt vote for him for president based on that. Seems to me a person who gets 3 purple hearts in 4 months is proubly more careless than heroic.

 While i dont see bushs service in the air national guard as anything significant in this campaign ( for me anyway ) i do think that the claiming that  nation guard service is not worth while  for the sole perpose of hurting bush  politicly is a bit out of line. The national guard isnt shown a 10th of the respect it deserves despite the considerbale peace time services it provides so if you want to bash bush thats fine but leave the guard alone.  They may not be Green barrets but that dosent mean its cool to spit on them.

Because it may not necessarily be legit. It sounds a lot more like intentional disinformation than anything else. I've got a rough time believing that the same intelligence apparatus that claimed the Soviet Union was a powerful threat right up until the point where they collapsed suddenly knows who our enemies want us to vote for. Seriously, it's so prejudicial it's not even funny. You all know I don't like Kerry, I see very little difference between Bush's policies and what Kerry is promising, but the only way this could get more blatant would be if Bush himself issued a statement that voting for Kerry was a treasonous act. Not only that, but it reinforces the idiotic "people who don't like Bush love terrorists and Saddam Hussein" nonsense. Why else would "sensitive intelligence" like this be shared with the press? For that matter, again I ask why such a secretive group like Al Qaeda would let their "candidate" be known? There's far too many gaping holes for this to be legitimate.

Al Qaeda was all ready decentralized, that's why it's been so difficult to get someone inside the organization. They're composed mainly of small groups or "cells" of people that operate independently. Infiltrating their network is so difficult because there's no network to infiltrate. That's why even though Bin Laden is either in hiding or dead, they continue to make attacks, a central leadership is unnecessary for them to function. As far as the Taliban being gone, someone better tell them because US military outposts in Afghanistan still come under fire regularly, their "morality police" still accost women for dressing immodestly, being seen in the company of men that are not relatives and trying to go to school or work. Afghani "President" Hamad Karazi can't go anywhere in Kabul without a heavy armed guard and can't go anywhere outside Kabul period. People that keep wanting to bleat "Mission accomplished" should probably check with the people actually getting shot at first. As far as Bush following through with a threat, I've got two words for you: North Korea. And if he's done some much damage to Al Qaeda, where exactly are all these new recruits coming from that are showing up in Iraq? You know, the ones that weren't there before the US decided that NOW Hussein needed to go, not after the first Gulf War when Iraqis begged the US to support an uprising but were left to those same torture chambers and executions that were used as part of the pretext for this most recent war. If Al Qaeda wants anybody in office, they'd probably settle for either one of the guys who think military might is actually going to solve something it hasn't managed to solve for decades but has managed to do wonders for recruiting. I'm just so tired of the "if you are for this guy/think this way/say this stuff, you're for the terrorists" crap. History shows there's only one road that kind of mindset goes down. When you demonize entire groups of people for thinking differently, you can justify just about any level of atrocity committed against them. I'm not terribly comfortable being in that group, but I'll be damned if I'm going to shut up and behave like a good little citizen of the State.

Logical fallacy. That's like telling me that because I can't rebuild an engine I'm not qualified to notice when it's not functioning right. I never said I know how to solve the problem better than those in charge, I just said I know what's currently not working. Look at Russia, they've been even more brutal than the US in dealing with terrorists. They've buried them in pigskin to symbolically deny them access to Heaven, they've murdered family members, they've tortured them, summarily executed them and if anything it has increased the resolve of the Chechen terrorists. Some people say insanity is repeating the same actions and expecting different results. Military action is not going to provide a solution to a problem that is mainly being CAUSED by military action. My main gripe is, neither party is going to put a stop to that any time soon. As always, they and the people that give them financial support make the policy and the profit, the rest of us get to do the dying. That's something that 9/11 should have really been illustrative of. The vast majority of the people killed that day weren't captains of industry, politicians or government intelligence operatives. They were regular people like us that figured they were going home after work that day. If the body count keeps going up, which it has been, we are not winning. It's not enough to kill them if more people are going to sign up to follow in the footsteps of the martyred dead. Figuring out how to stop that cycle isn't appeasement, it's not weakness, it's common sense. Of course, it's ultimately not profitable either.

i think razchek(sp?) said it best in starship troopers when he said "the theory that 'violence never solved anything' is wishful thinking at best, brute force has solved more conflicts in history that all other options combined"



btw, everyone harps on OUR body count(700ish? out of about a half million or so people in the armed forces, yeah we certainly are losing; idk what it is, dont care really) .... how many non civilian(since everyones so uppity about that too!) people have we killed? thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, its pretty simple, kill more of them than they kill of us. eventually there will be none left of them due to a) weve killed them all and their ideology is gone, or b) there will be too few of them left to be of any consequence and any of them will be shunned by the people that once supported them either out of fear or of good conscience.

Maybe it's because they're not getting fixed.


We also have a word for thinking you know what someone's doing without evidence to go on. It's called "assumption". The "you're just trying to get attention for yourself" and "you're just whining" are very familiar criticisms, usually leveled by people who don't want to contemplate that a system by and large controlled by those with money and power is no longer within our ability to fix. It's been taken out of our hands. The people who end up running for office that we're supposed to vote for are not necessarily the best people for the job nor do they have our best interests at heart. They're the ones that could spend the most money and make themselves look the best in the media. Incidentally, there's also word for refusing to acknowledge a situation, it's called "denial".


They're also not going to be deterred by the possibility of dying either. As you said, they're religious fanatics. Dying for their beliefs is not something to be avoided but to be embraced.

 
The US is targeted because the US has supplied arms to Israel, because they've propped up numerous dictators in the region like the Shah of Iran and Saddam Hussein and because they've destabilized governments whose only transgression was to engage in policy that ran counter to US interests. As far as Israel being targeted because "they've always wanted the Jews gone" you might want to look into a little history yourself, like what happened to all the people that were living in that area right before Israel was formed. You also might want to look up groups like Irgun and the Stern Gang. That may provide a nice perspective on ?terrorism? in that region. And the "center for Western Christianity" thing might not be so if certain idiots would quit proclaiming that we are a "Christian nation" in direct ignorance of a). all the citizens of the US who are NOT Christian and b). centuries of law and Constitutional doctrine, like the Treaty of Tripoli.



Thereby creating tomorrow's honored martyrs for the next batch of terrorist recruits to idolize. Maybe if we weren't rolling our tanks through their countries like we own the place and giving them fresh stacks of bomb-shredded bodies to point at as they rail against "The Great Satan" they wouldn't draw as much of a crowd.  Killing them is not working.


Yes, I was expecting bridge club. And I'd love for more US civilians to die. I'd also love for fanatic fundamentalist Muslims to take over the country and put me and all of my pagan, homosexual and atheist friends to death. Look, hang the condescension for a minute. I know full well what war is like, not as much as someone actually in it but a hell of a lot more than some average CNN-watching armchair general. This is combat in the really real world; the participants don't get to respawn after they get splattered and there are tons of noncombatants that happen to be living in the arena that don't get to respawn either. This is a lot deeper than this "We're the good guys, they're the bad guys" nonsense, because you know what? They think they're the good guys and we're not. That's what they're taught, and they don't think any farther than that either. Both sides engage in the same chest-thumping, flag-waving, ?we?re #1!? routine. They don?t realize they?re being suckered into throwing their lives away by fanatics, and until they do this definitely won?t stop. They think they?re fighting against a foreign invader that?s out to destroy their culture and their faith. And every time the military levels a mosque, shoots up a wedding party, talks about this war as a ?Crusade?, has soldiers who call them ?ragheads? and worse, humiliates and degrades them and then waves it off as being no worse than a fraternity initiation, the fanatics are being proven right. Oh, and much like our esteemed President, it?s very easy to say ?let them run up against the US military and die?, ?bring it on?, when you?re not the one sitting in the desert getting shot at. Oops, my mistake, I?m supposed to hate the soldiers, not feel sympathy for them.



Hedhunta, it's funny you should mention that. I always liked that movie, but not for the reason most people did. I liked it because it showed how easy it is to get people to root for the fascists. That's exactly what the "good guys" were, a high-tech version of Nazi Germany, except instead of being white supremacists they were human supremacists. The propaganda, the uniforms, the society structure, take another good look. Verhooven did a great job of integrating that stuff subtley enough that not many people noticed. Oh, and in case you think that upping the body count is really the solution, I've got one word for you: Vietnam.



Yes, yes, the inherent nobility and goodness of the US military, trying to spare the civilians while our wicked, Satan-inspired enemies cover themselves in babies, hold old ladies up infront of themselves and hide inside busloads of schoolchildren. "Collateral damage", folks. The military plans for and accepts collateral damage, which as we all know is the cleaned-up term for "civilians who get smoked".  Now to quote you from earlier, Phoenix, "I've also got some rather rude news for you if you think there's a way to break this cycle by being "humanitarian" about it.". Now we are being humanitarian about it? Last time I checked, killing people was not any part of the definition of humanitarian.


That's patently not true. They may not be leveling them with concentrated bombardment, but it's not stopping them from busting the door in and shooting up the place. story link


I sincerely hope no one from that region reads what you're saying. Ever. What would you expect Iraqis to say to that? "Thank you for not exterminating us like cockroaches?". This is generosity and humanitarianism, the fact that we haven't started mass executions or nuked them? "Shut up and quit complaining, we're giving you food and water after we demolished what was left of your civilian infrastructure and we're only killing you by accident and whrn you piss us off, this is nothing compared to what we could be doing to you right now.", gee, how generous. I can't imagine why they haven't yet been coming out to meet our soldiers with bunches of flowers in thanks for not being shown what could be done to them. "Oh wow, it's all good, I don't have to worry about being carbonized and my entire country being reduced to a fused sheet of radioactive glass. It's just little stuff like getting blown away at a checkpoint, being handed back over to the Iraqi cops that were beating the crap out of me, having my house flattened by "stray" bombs or artillery, or getting caught in the crossfire between US troops and fanatic Muslim gunmen that don't live here and weren't even around less than a year ago. Oh joy." Funny you should mention the Jews earlier, since it looks like you have your own idea of a "Final Solution" to the "Mideast Problem".

What really gets me is that after a screed like that, you still don't have a single clue about where the new recruits for fanatics come from, why they hate us so much, or why it's so easy to get them to hate us.

Sure, I'll come down off my "barely passed high school and flunked out of college" intellectual pedestal. Here I figured I was keeping it fairly simple. I don't recall implying you were ignorant either, maybe just avoiding looking at certain things too closely. Just understand that I'm not some rich kid idle intellectual fresh out of Berkely or some crap, I'm a guy who crashed and burned in college and has busted ass working for the past 7 years to support a family, who used to think very much like you do now, hell, maybe I was even MORE gung-ho than you are and then ended up getting a very nasty wake-up call. So I don't study Marx, Engels or Bakunin, sometimes I read stuff that Chomsky writes if I can get my brain to focus that long, but I definitley don't have a bunch of degrees after my name. As for "cutting up the argument", that's how I do it. I address each point in turn rather than just ramble like a speed freak, which is how I'd write if I DIDN'T split stuff up. And yes, that was sarcasm. I may have mentioned this before, but after hearing all this "you just love terrorists/you want America to lose" stuff so often for so long now I tend to get a little snarky about it. Look, I understand Wahaabism pretty well, I have read up on it. I know how totalitarian and constrictive they are, I understand they treat women like property and I understand the contempt they have for those of other paths. I also understand that until the past 30-40 years, they were just some backwards offshoot of mainstream Islam that had no popularity because, well, it just wasn't appealing. That's shifted, you might say they've decided dying on their feet is preferable to living on their knees, whether or not they really ARE living on their knees. Selling something is as much dependent on WHO you're selling it to as much as what you're selling and how you're selling it. So while Wahaabism wasn't very palatable to people who were living fairly comfortable lives, once the misery level started going up, it started looking better. And like it or not, our government has had a hand in creating that misery. As I said towards the beginning, the CIA may not have created Wahaabism, but they've definitley made sure that it's got some nice blood-soaked ground to grow in. We can't have agents of our government going overseas and screwing with other countries that pose no military threat to us but aren't doing things the way we want and then cry "Foul!" when it comes home to roost. So technically we're both right. The fundamentalists have spread Wahaabism AND our government has engaged in actions guaranteed to make it appealing to people who feel we're screwing with them for no reason. Oh, and don't get yourself all wrapped up in wanting something done about Saudi Arabia. Barring a miracle (or utter catastrophe) nothing's going to happen there any time soon.


Baader-Meinhoff Gang, Germany. Irish Republican Army, Ireland. Pretty much any bonehead white supremacist group, the United States. Terrorists don't just have brown skin and live in the Middle East. I invite you to name for me any democratic and free country in the entire world that has become free and democratic due to the military intervention of the US since WW2. I can name you plenty that we've screwed with since then.


Four words. School of the Americas. One more word: Contras. If that isn't promoting terrorism, I'm Santa Claus. But I understand when they work for us, they're called "freedom fighters".


My goal will never happen in my lifetime. I'd like to see the whole diseased system torn apart and replaced by NOTHING. No heirarchy. No centralized government, no authority derived from money and power. But I know it'll never happen in my lifetime because humanity isn't mature enough to not want to be led. For the now, I'd like to see people stop whining about how everybody else in the world seems to hate us and then pretty much excusing everything our government does. It's like wondering why no one wants to hang out with you, when you've got a friend who won't stop flipping people off and crapping on the hood of their car every time someone disagrees with you.

Look Phoenix, I don't have a mad-on for you personally but I'm at the saturation point right now for "We're the good guys and we always do the right thing for the right reasons" shite.  I used to think that way too. I used to think Reagan was the best president ever and Oliver North was a real American hero. Instead what I find out is that Reagan was a lying old reptile that talked tough about terrorists and then cut deals with them behind our backs to make himself look good and North was a disgrace to his uniform and the Corps who helped a bunch of "freedom fighters" who went after nothing but soft civilian targets and never got within miles of real armed forces if they could avoid it. Nobody wants to look in the mirror and say "You know, maybe they've got a point outside the other crap. Maybe we are partly responsible."  Everybody just wants to dodge it and say "Screw that, it's their fault, goddamn backward savages, we're just trying to bring them democracy and freedom." Who knows, maybe they saw what happened to the last group of backward savages we tried to "help" and don't like that idea too much.  In light of stuff like Abu Ghraib, I don't think I blame them either. What I've seen so far is that not only do the insurgents not want the US in Iraq, they don't want the Wahaabists there either. There have been a few statements issued warning Al Qaeda operatives to get their carcasses out of the country or face the consequences. Look at it this way. The US supported Saddam Hussein for the longest time, right up until the Kuwait invasion. We had an opportunity to remove him then, the Iraqi resistance practically begged us to do so, and they were left to twist in the wind. NOW all of a sudden it's important to remove Hussein after he's been in place all these years, after all the mass graves, the chemical weapons used against his own people, after all the abductions and tortures. They're supposed to trust that we're there to do the right thing THIS time? I don't know, maybe I just ask too many questions. Maybe I'd be happier if I didn't. But I do. As far as my solutions and what I do, I try to get people to ask themselves those uncomfortable questions. The big solution, well, like I said, people like to be led. That's not going to change until they find themselves slogging around knee-deep in their own dead and realize who made it that way. That's what it'll take before people in general say "Okay, you had your chance, you cocked it all up, now you need to go." Until then, the people entrenched on both sides of this are going to stay right where they are and they're going to do whatever they have to to stay there. There is no sacrifice they are not willing to have us make. I don't feel like being used to grease the wheels. I used to think we really were free, but then I asked myself how free and saw that it only worked that way if we were willing to be our own jailers and stay inside the cages we're taught to build for ourselves. Don't question, don't complain, cooperate, consume, conform. All you've got to do is take a look at the way our system (and those in other countries) treat people who don't go along with that program, that'll show you how free we really are. We're free to be what they want us to be, once you step outside that area, like it used to say on maps of old "Here there be monsters". Anyways, I'm done rambling like I said I wasn't going to. Understand I mean no disrespect, I just tend to be very blunt, I prefer it to sugar-coating things. I'm actually a really nice guy once you get to know me  

Oh, and I haven't talked to Assamite, he's usually too busy wiping the floor with me on the server.