Hitler V Lenin?Follow

Joph I understand politically why, I was asking morally.

Israel has a very bad human rights record for the number of civies killed during their defence, if the US was to temper its support or at least not appear to grant them the right to kill anything they want.

I stopped reading after they started arguing using wikipedia.

C'mon, BBBD. These are A-rab Muzzies we are talking about here. No amount of gentle treatment, no playing nicey-nice is going to make them want to exterminate Israel any less or love us any more. Your post just illustrates how pervasive the whole "everybody hates us now so we better just roll over for the Muzzies and try to be their friend" group-think has sunk in our collective consciousness. World politics and power isn't a popularity contest. Stop trying to win Miss Congeniality here, ok?

Let's assume regardless of veracity for a moment that everything in the Middle East is about oil and that from the creation of a Jewish state to the Iraq War is all about the Bushies and Big Oil Companies trying to control energy sources. If it betters our circumstances, what of it? It's not like those A-rabs have any better use for it themselves. They still wipe their a$$es with their bare fingers, for cryin' out loud. Their only use for oil is the scented kind to mask the smell of fecal matter on their hands. So what? If they have readily available oil and we need it, then by all means, we should be the ones who determine who gets it and at what price. I have absolutely no problem with that.

Totem

Do you seriously believe that the West can convince the Middle East to stop pulling their **** by being nice, Red? Before you answer that, I'd have you recall these same people sided with the ***** during WW2. May I remind you they have a long and colorful history of being on the wrong side of things. Everything about that region foments brutality and violence: the geography, weather, the religion, the culture, even the animals native to the Middle East are nasty buggers.

You must have an optimistic streak a continent wide, my friend.

Totem

Comparing bin Laden to Lenin, or Hitler is laughable.

OBL has a few thousand (at the most)followers around the world. He doesnt have an army, navy or an airforce, (tho I guess he isnt averse to 'borrowing the odd plane now and again). He's a crank, and the only reason he's still in the news is because of the amount of attention he recieves from the likes of Bush. (When it suits him! Why was he 'allowed 'to escape from Tora bora? Why was the unit assigned to track him down, disbanded?)

Bush and Blair use the name of bin Laden purely to bolster their own flagging popularity. The politics of fear at its most cynical. By tying OBLs name to Hitler or Lenin, they are trying (and it would seem succeeding) to frighten the citizens of their countries into believing that there is a threat to our existence, and therefore 'we' need to back Bush/Blair in their efforts to 'protect' us. Its nothing new.

The thing that is new, is the fact that 'we' as individuals have at our fingertips, access to information, via the internet, that previous generations did not. and the scary thing is, that even tho we do have this information, vast swathes of the population, still fall for it.

For example, the latest excuse for staying in iraq, is, and I quote GWB from his latest speech..


What a load of bollox!! the USA with its Army navy and airforce, including 140,000 soldiers and its satelite surveilance and christ knows what else cant 'take over' Iraq in the time they've been there. what makes Bush believe that OBL could do it. He is, after all, a Sunni with only a small following among Sunnis, and the majority in Iraq is Shi'ite.

Its utter fantasy. Like the majority of the rubbish that Bush and co spout, its there to scare the masses. The supporters of these politicians can twist and turn the words that they speak as much as they like to justify what they want to believe, but to the rest of the free thinking individuals who dont live in a world where theres a boogey man under evry bed, comparing OBL to Hitler or Lenin is nothing more than than delusional ranting.

Bush is desperate to be what he knows he is not – a great man. He has tried to cmpare himself to Winston Churchill leading the forces of democracy in a great crusade against the forces of darkness. The only trouble is, there is nobody out there in the dark.

Sure, bin Laden and his followers hate (y)our guts. So what? They are half a drop in the bucket of 6 billion people. Bush has so distorted his view of reality, he does not seem to realize that most of our "allies" in the Middle East are dictators, and the people he calls terrorists – Hamas and Hezbollah – participated in free elections. Some would say more free and fair than the last two farcical elections in the US.

The more I hear from Bush of late the more he sounds like that paranoid twit in charge of north korea, And the more gbaji sounds like that idiotic 'minister of information' that was predicting the destruction of the US military in a 'sea of blood' even as, in the background, the first tanks could be seen arriving in Baghdad.

For goodness sake, Get real.

because were we to catch him we would have to find a new anti-figurehead to throw our darts at in our offices.
We aren't finding him because he is an asset for our public's view of T.W.A.T.

I dunno, I think I'd take a Romanesque length of time to be the world power. And they did a mighty fine job of it too. Care to guess what their technique was, BBBD? Ottomans had a pretty good run at it as well.

Totem

Touche, I am guessing that the only non-violent worl power would have been the early Hapsburgs. They just married everyone in Europe and made a huge Empire and at one stage nearly united Spain, France and Austria-Hungary.

Then they started repressing the minorities within the state and then lost a big war and got ****** up.

The problem is the Romans had the longest time, before and after that no-one has got close or as large. So I doubt that America can hold on that long. You have had what 50 years so far, I give you another 50.

Especially if China becomes even more important.

Until the Chinese economy becomes the biggest and turns around and starts beating you like a red headed step child.

Ah. So when Hezbollah attacks Isreal from Lebanon, we should just nuke Lebananon?

Mighty brilliant of you there.

So all I have to do to destroy a country is stage a terrorist attack from it and I win? That seems pretty darn stupid as a foreign policy. The fact is that no matter how much people bleat and cry about it, Bush's approach is the correct one. You have to be willing to get into the situation and get a little dirty to "fix" it. The solution has to lie somewhere between the European "solution" of ignoring it as long as trade still works, to your idea of nuking anyone that gets out of hand. And guess what? That means using military forces, on the grounds, in nations that can't play well with the other nations.

Yeah. Like Viet Nam. How'd that turn out anyway?

The problem Democrats have when it comes to wars and foreign policy is that they measure success in terms of cost over time instead of obtaining goals. Everything is treated as though it's a domestic policy rather then a foreign one. The concept of "body count" as a measure of success failed miserably the last time it tried, yet for some reason many Dems still try to measure success in Iraq the same way.

I'm not sure when "the change" occured that made Dems utterly unable to grasp the basics of winning conflicts. Sometime after WW2 and before Viet Nam I assume. Because if FDR had measured success the same way Murtha and Kerry want us to, we'd have declared 1942 and 1943 stunning successes, and 1944 and 1945 absolute failures. Never mind that we won in 44 and 45, but I guess we'd have gotten as far as Bastogne and "withdrawn" when the fighting got too rough. And perhaps stopped at Guadalcanal as well.

You don't win by acting always to minimize the total number of deaths. The Dems used to understand this. Somewhere along they line they forgot. And they still haven't figured it out again yet. And until they do, I'm simply not going to buy the whole "We know how to fight without wasting troops" bit. More correctly it's "we know how to string a conflict out as long as possible, while suffering minimal casualties per year, but never accomplishing anything thus making what losses we do suffer utterly meaningless".

Yeah. That's more like it. ;)

I always thought gabji was the craziest person on this board when it came to international relations.

But you win.

By a mile.



That's because our local peace was built on trade. And I think, in some respect, it's great. States, like people, take into account positive and negative incentives when deciding the best course of action. For all their rethoric about race/religion/economic systems, whatever, it almost always comes down to money in then end.

So if you trade heavily with a nation, not only do you have a much bigger influence and lever-power over them, it's also a decent insurance that they wont do anything too stupid. Ever noticed how the craziest states tend to be the ones who don't do much trade internationally? N.Korea, Zimbabwe, Myanmar...

Having said that EU nations are still pussies.



And this is still funny.



No. i'd even say it's further away, since the people they are fighting against are stronger than before, since the Sunni/Shia divide is increasingly leading to a bloody civil war, and since most of the IRaqi population sees the government as corrupt at best, and criminally incompetent at worse.



Unfortunately, I think so. Public opnion at home is getting more and more fed up with this war. The costs, both human and financial are too high, and most people don't understand what this has to do with teh "war on terror". It is a mistake, I think, but the US is going to slowly withdraw sooner than later. And then Iraq will be properly fuuked. The best we can hope for in there is a not too bloody break-up of the country.

But let's face it. The US army won't kill all the insurgents. They are not going to leave. And I don't think the US has the political will to stay long enough for there to be a real Irqi army and police that could do what the US army can't, ie dealing with the insurgents.

You're taking this totally out of context.

The "Mission Completed" banner clearly visible behind him was for something else completely.


I wish there was a way for me to say that in 500+ words.