Well Toast, this one's for you. I was going to reply in the comments, but it sort of outgrew that, so:
yeah, I sorta remember us talking about Iraq quite a bit... interesting how you already back then never used al qaeda as an argument, while the entire press was basically screaming about it constantly. Good thing :)
Still waiting for some report on the whole Weapons of Mass Destruction though. None found yet, right? Wow, why am I not surprised?
And does anyone but me see the irony in vetoing that resolution? France, Germany and Russia?!?!? Bah I say, bah!
The Iraq debate was an interesting one. Knowing what I know now, I'm not sure I'd have said all of what I remember saying, but.
I never used AQ in my arguments because it was abundantly clear to me even then that no matter what the administration was saying, the links between the two were weak at best, and frankly we had a lot better reasons to be doing the thing. Like WMDs. And me, I still believe that Saddam WAS trying to work on the things, trying to hide...something. He clearly had no intention of complying with the UN. It worries me that we haven't found much, but it was a good reason.
There are also the reasons of Saddam just being a really bad guy in general, our continuing low-grade war there, and a particular need of ours to have a state in the Middle East that will showcase democracy in the region and give us some sort of friend there besides Israel, who isn't exactly the one we want to be showcasing, and the Saudis, who, well, aren't. Much less assorted other undemocratic bunches. And I guess when it comes right down to it, I viewed, and view all of those reasons as being good ones. All of this spewing about "pre-emptive war" is, I think, a disguise. Nations will do what they want in the end, anyway.
And of those, long-term, the democracy one is going to be big. Because I think this is it. This is the West (including Europe, here) versus extremist Islam in Cold War II, which is likely to be more of a hot war than the last one. And we're going to be here for probably much of our lifetimes.
Which isn't to disguise the fact that the Bush administration has done a horrible job of going about diplomacy. I had always sort of thought that vaguely, but poking around Wes Clark's website and thinking a bit on the 90s, it occured to me that Clinton would have found a way to get Europe on board and doing more or less what he wanted anyway. Bush made a little stab at it, but not really. And that's a bad, bad thing. And even Bush is starting to realize that. He'll be lucky if he gets anything. Were I the UN, Europe in general, I'd probably tell him to fuck off just out of spite, which may well be what they're doing. I don't like it, but can't really blame them.
The problem, of course, is that in the coming election, we've got a foreign policy choice ranging from Bush on the one hand to a whole range of Democrats on the other, ranging from pure isolationism (yeah, that'll work...) to the pretty good ideas of Edwards and Dean, to Clark, who's got about the only worthwhile game in town that I can tell. OTOH, we know Bush's domestic record (hurty), Edwards and Dean who have pretty good ideas, and Clark, who so far as I can tell hasn't got one yet.
We shall see.
Posted by Dwip at September 18, 2003 2:11 PMThe Iraq debate was an interesting one. Knowing what I know now, I'm not sure I'd have said all of what I remember saying, but.
Never been in a debate where that wasn't true in retrospective :)
The brunt of the post as I see it is basically this:
The US didn't like Saddam nor his politics. They decided to take him out using a war, which they simply did, despite other countries opposing it.
Sound about right?
In that case, whatever happened to a country's sovereignty? Not saying that I think that's a really good point in any way, but seeing as it is a law, you basically had no right whatsoever to go in and fight that war. Assuming you don't find any WMD that is. Not that it really matters since the US won't acknowledge international courts which simply means that no matter how illegal it was, Bush or whoever appropriate, can never be put on trial for it.
Then we have Clinton. I agree with you, but that is without knowing much about it. Just my general idea of Clinton... Which says quite a bit about his reputation vs Bush's outside of the US (I know I'm not alone in that viewpoint). And to add to that we have the veto issue which just happened (notice also that in this case it was only the US that vetoed, while it was France, Germany and Russia(?) that voted against regarding the war).
Jumping off the Kyoto treaty-train wasn't exactly the wisest move ever either imo... Of course, that's a long time ago, but it says a lot about the arrogancy the Bush (what's the word?) office (nope, not that, but you know what I mean...I hope ;)) displays.
Since I've just written an essay for biology the last 3 or 4 hours this prolly makes no sense whatsoever...And it's guraranteed to be "hole-pickable" (new words are always good :P).
Good night everyone :)
Posted by: toasty at September 18, 2003 3:08 PMReally, the whole mess revolves around something completely ungraspable. Deterance. Bush. Personal war. Whatever.
Boom. Bye bye everyone but us.
Posted by: Whir at September 18, 2003 5:01 PMThe brunt of the post as I see it is basically this:
The US didn't like Saddam nor his politics. They decided to take him out using a war, which they simply did, despite other countries opposing it.
Sound about right?
More or less that's the simple version. The complicated version points out that nobody ELSE liked Saddam EITHER, but there was a lot of hesitation about letting a US administration, especially one being as annoying as ours is, to do it by themselves. And then there's folks like the French, but I don't really feel like going there.
Sovereignty, of course, is a nice little legal fiction supposedly protecting people from invasion. In reality, of course, if somebody wants to invade you, they will. Might still does make right, at the end of the day, even in this century. Yeah, we broke it, but there's at least a paper-thin legal argument on the part of the US that Saddam WASN'T complying with the UN resolution. Which somehow reconciles with the whole "Fuck the UN" stance. Somehow.
As for international courts, that's an iffy one. Suffice it to say that our Constitution practically prohibits us from signing on to them, as I understand it, and I think I'm thinking of Article III, Section 2 and the 11th Amendment in particular, because such courts are capable of infringing on our rights as citizens. That and there's some (I think justifiable) worries that said courts would almost immediately be used against us, fairly or not.
And yes, that means that, in the end, short of declaring war or cutting off trade, which kills everyone else too, there's not and never really was any way of preventing the US from declaring war if we wanted to.
On the veto, the US vetoed, France/Germany/Russia abstained. Syria, of all people, brought the resolution in the first place. No, that resolution never had any chance of passing the US. Yes, France, Germany, and Russia knew that.
Kyoto. Another iffy one. As I understand it, Kyoto was always pretty much DOA, but no, Bush didn't really make any efforts to fix that. And no, nobody really expected him to in the first place, him being Bush. He wanted to drill the ANWR, for chrissakes, much less quite a few other things.
Posted by: Dwip at September 18, 2003 9:46 PM"and a particular need of ours to have a state in the Middle East that will showcase democracy in the region and give us some sort of friend there besides Israel"
If THAT was all we needed to do, we could have actually fixed Afghanistan. Remember how Bush forgot to put any money for Afghanistan in the budget last year, and Congress had to add it in?
Posted by: Regina at September 19, 2003 6:16 AMWho's Afghanistan? There are countries in the middle east that aren't Iraq and Israel?
Posted by: Whir at September 19, 2003 1:53 PMYes, Palestine. The others they're just making up, they don't really exist
Posted by: toasty at September 19, 2003 3:58 PMPalestine serves as such a great jumping-off point for metaphysical questions. It exists, except not really. :P
Posted by: Regina at September 20, 2003 7:42 AMThe thing with Afghanistan... Well, there's a lot of things with Afghanistan in regards to showcasing democracy and all of that, but the main one is that it's not Iraq, and it's not really smack in the middle of things, exactly. Not that I'm not all for fluffy pink bunnies in Afghanistan, too, but point is it's a lot different to have that guy over there be an example than, say, your next door neighbor.
Because, ultimately, it's places like Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iran, what we'll be caring about. Uzbekistan doesn't really feature as prominantly into things.
Posted by: Dwip at September 20, 2003 5:17 PM