iraq report is in, let the spinn beginFollow

Everyone who agrees with me wins. It's in the rulebook somewhere, isn't it?

Just want to say that Congress thinking or doing something shouldn't place any burden of proof on anyone, because Congress is often idiotic and mercurial.

Gbaji,

You missed the point. A good number of pretenses for war have become invalid yet you among others, still think this war is somehow valid.

It was a mistake then, due to the lack of WMD (which BTW about half of all pretenses were about), and it is a mistake now.

Yet you, and idiots like you, seem to think it's okay for people to die in a war that shouldn't have happened in the first place. Kudos to you and Republicans for making a well calculated decision.

It would be much better if they'd actually fess up to the mistake, yet you get this (old video) type of ****. Or countless other stories where Rumsfeld and others can't seem to get their stories straight, or even in line with the 9/11 Commission.

Finally would you mind answering the questions about Saddam I asked earlier, or are they a little to difficult?

How can you agree?!

Seriously, how?!

This is the stupidest bit of fake logic I've heard in a long time...

Think about it: Gbaji is saying that you can debuke the "Attacking Iraq was wrong because they weren't a threat" by saying "Well the US attacked Germany in WW2 and they weren't a threat."

When that got bombed, he changed to "attack". Gbaji's argument became: "Attacking Iraq eventhough they didn't attack the US was not wrong, because in 1942 the US invaded Germany eventhough it hadn't attacked the US and that was good".

Leaving aside the factual errors that render this comparaison totally useless, it is fake logic.

The reason why the US attacking Germany in WWII was "not wrong" was not because "it is ok to attack nations that haven't attacked you", which is basically the argument gbaji is making and you agree with.

The US attack on Germnay in WWII was "not wrong" because there were a multitude of factors that mitigated the fact that Germany hadn't attacked the US (well, it did, but according to gbaji anyway), such as an ongoing genocide, the invasion of most of the US's allies, a declaration of war, and a hundred others that you can find in any decent History book.

Get it? Sinking in slowly?

I can't believe people still fall for this completely fraudulent piece of "logic".

Idiots.

First of all, his original point was that the "positives of invading Iraq outweighted the negatives" and that Europeans should understand that because of WWII:



That was the first reference.

Then we got:



Still nothing to do with "we weren't threatened and yet it was ok to attack."

Then we got:



He's saying that some of the arguments made by the anti Iraq war are wrong because when you apply them to WWII they don't work cos WWII was a "just war".

His "original point" of "The *only* objective was to show that the argument that if Iraq didn't attack the US directly that attacking them was "wrong" [is false]" arrived at the bottom of page 3.



So you agree that you can dismiss the argument about "whether the US was right to invade Iraq since it did not pose a threat", because in WWII, Germany didn't pose a threat to the US and it was right to invade them then?

Or, to use your examples, you agree that you can't criticize the decison to invade Iraq on the grounds that it wasn't a direct threat to, or attacked, the US, because the US invaded Korea eventhough it wasn't a threat to, or attacked, the US?

It's exactly like saying that the US should use a nuke on Iraq, because it used one on Japan and that was the right decision.



Right, next time I'll just agree with a half-*** comparaison that doesn't stand to scrutiny, is factually incorrect, and is the attempted last escape route of a desperatly flawed argument.

Thanks, I did miss that first reference, the second and third might evolve from the same line though depending on his reasoning.



I agree it can be dismissed within context. But if your quote here is all anyone has ever known about Iraq, the US, WWII and Germany, and ethical or practical decisions, it can't be dismissed. It can be set aside due to lack of detail. But if you insist on basing an ethical or practical decision on solely that, it's actually truthful. As in "Is X right if Y?" If X is the same action and Y the same parameter in both cases, and you have literally nothing else to go on, and assume both circumstances fall under the same decision-making guidelines, then the same must hold true for both cases.

That's why context is important, and that's why saying "Is X right if Y?" in the case of warring is never a given right/wrong. There are too many Ys and in this case, not-Ys, such that no two cases are equal.



Well, first we'd have to assume as in the analogy that 100% of people agreed that warring with Korea was the right thing to do (or with Germany, and I did caveat that less than 100% probably agreed). If you do that you have a precedent to use as an analogy to the Iraq decision based on a single criteria. Gbaji's point was that you can't solely base the decision on a few limited criteria, in his first example lack of recognized positives, second lists of negatives, third similar counterarguments.



No, it's like saying "you can't use X as the argument against using a nuke on Iraq if 100% of people agreed that using it on Japan was the right choice despite X also existing for that situation, and you're basing your decision soley on X".

i.e. someone says "You can't nuke Iraq, it's the wrong thing to do because civilians will be killed" and says nothing else about why it would be wrong. The response is "We nuked Japan, it was the right thing to do, but civilians were killed therefore your argument is false."

By the way I think nuking Japan was the wrong thing to do, this would only work for 100% agreement that it was the right thing.



...I was happily arguing along with anyone else at gbaji's ridiculous WWII comparisons. He finally made pleas of his supposed original or real sole rehtorical-only point (which I missed or misunderstood before) which I'd agree with, one in direct reply to something of mine. What am I supposed to do? Simply not post a reply? Do my best to demonstrate that that wasn't in fact his sole point? Ignore that and continue with the tangential arguments about WMD and Iraq being a threat? All so my ego is kept intact by not ceding something in an internet argument? It's been three pages of mainly BS irrelevance, gbaji-footinmouth, and gbaji-getcha; I'm perfectly fine with ignoring that in favor of acknowledging a simple point. And that's all I ******* did, I didn't say "yes I agree with everything you've said in the thread". Hardly.

Given comedians worldwide ready made material?

FUCked over the Republican Party for the next 20 years?

I'll add to that that I largely approved of Bush's immigration stance and wish that he had had the "political capital" to pull it off within his own party. Bush created a large aquatic wildlife refuge that I liked hearing about.

I've agreed with Gbaji on things before. None immediately spring to mind (well, we both feel approximately the same on immigration reform) but I doubt Gbaji would deny that we've ever agreed.

Political debate here is a model of radical subjectivity.

Hi. You're a moron. Now, stay with me, fucknut, because I happen to hold the opinion that your very lack of a reasonable intellect makes you quite valuable on this board.

You see, often there is a dilemma when we engage in political discussion, not over the actual issues at hand which we all understand sufficiently well and have divided into two vague groups, the "please stop fucking the stupid people for personal gain" group and the "Why whatever do you mean, sir, but of course tax cuts for the ultra rich will help poor people more than raising the minimum wage" group. What it turns out we really tend to argue over the most is how each side can most effectively communicate it's ideas to abject drooling simpletons.

This is where you come in. Being so astonishingly gullible and prone to the simplest of rhetorical tricks, you're an ideal case study for who is more effectively advocating their position to the mentally retarded, brain injury victims, and most importantly, crucial independent voters.

You are the barometer, yes, the weather vane of the winds of flighty emotional decisions that change at the drop of a hat, or the re-labeling of the identical policy. You're for the estate tax but against the death tax. You're pro choice, but you think abortion is a bad idea. You believe in God, but aren't sure about seat belts.

Welcome to the coal mine, canary, where would we be without you?



Edited, Oct 4th 2007 6:05pm by Smasharoo

Edited, Oct 4th 2007 6:06pm by Smasharoo

Just quick point (since we're going through the history/evolution of this discussion):



I didn't create that comparison though. I started with the "you need to list the positive and the negatives before coming to a conclusion". Yes. My original argument was based on the idea that if we listed only the negatives to getting involved in Europe in WW2, we'd have never done it, and thus it's incorrect to use that as the sole argument against military involvement in Iraq.

The argument got spun off into the whole "invasion" angle because of this response:



In response to this, I listed three counters:

1. Systematic genocide of the Kurds

2. The fact that our borders were certainly not threatened at any time by Germany.

3. That the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq was not "resolved" (due to lack of compliance with the cease fire agreement), and thus equally qualifies.

I also argued that he was missing the biggest positives, but that part went no-where (even though I actually think it's more important. Stuff like securing world peace for our children, building a better tomorrow, ending terrorism, etc...). But apparently, he thought the positives of WW2 only had to do with tossing Germany out of the country's it had invaded and kinda missed the bigger picture. Oh well...


In any case, the argument from that point focused on point number two. With several people insisting that Germany had attacked us, or somehow posed a threat to the US that Iraq did not. And that's how we arrived at the resulting statements by me. If the entire counterargument is based on the assumption that Germany was a threat to the US, but Iraq was not, then it's reasonable for me to substitute that into the logic being used.

ie: If Iraq not being a threat to the US is not sufficient reason (positives) to justify the UN engaging with Iraq militarily, then Germany not being a threat to the US was not sufficient cause for the same thing in WW2.


I believe we can all agree that the case with Germany isn't true (or as was pointed out, wasn't true after the fact), then we must say the same about Iraq.


You're correct that I started out talking about "positives" and switched over time. But that was in response to someone arguing what the positives were in Germany. I simply showed that those positives existed to the same degree (or didn't exist to the same degree) with Iraq, so their argument is false.

It's generally acceptable in logic to use a stated example from the other side and test it by substituting it into the original argument, right? That's all I've been doing. If you'd care to come up with some other positive for the US engaging militarily with Germany during WW2 that can't be said to apply to Iraq, I'd love to hear it. So far, I've shot down every single one.

Gbaji, just shut the fuck up.

**** Germany declared war on the US, not the other way around. They did it on their own accord and were not forced to do it by any means.

So you're telling me **** Germany declared war on the US for fucks and fun? The **** regime while bastards by every sense of the word, however they weren't stupid. They wouldn't have declared war on the US if they didn't actually plan to do anything about it.