Leaving things like this unanswered is dangerous, because there are many issues here which need clarification.

For someone so interested in grammar and punctuation it is amazing you have so much trouble with logic. Virtually everything you post tries to prove things using faulty logic, by excluding this huge expanse of middle ground so you can battle against the other extreme.

Who is this "left" you are talking about? There are plenty of centrists, swing voters, center left, center right, and hundreds of other interest groups left entirely out of your equation. Some people are leftist in some issues and rightist in others. All this middle ground are the ones who really decide most things while the extremes hurl insults at each other.

This is a nice illusion but it is just that...an illusion. There are two leading groups in the USA, just as there are two major political parties. While each democrat may not expect abortion on demand up to the moment the contractions start - a lot of them do. While each republican may not demand tax cuts - a lot of them do, too.

All these little groups take up their positions on one side of the aisle. When one fights these collective groups, one has to address the agenda and not the individual groups, or else one can get misled and lose the bigger picture.

You seem to want to shoehorn everyone into either being a Bush extreme right type or a communist/terrorst. The world has very little to do with either of them. Most of the US and probably 80% of the rest of the world's people disagree with Bush on most of his policies. Those people are nearly all outside this narrow version of the left you try and put them into. Many of them in other countries are right wing as well.

Sadly that 80% figure who disapprove of Bush matches the world's illiteracy/poverty rates in many places. I know many educated euro leftists pretty well and they match their US counterparts nicely. They are perhaps more dangerous because they are already accustomed to an environment where socialism is pervasive and accepted, by default, as some superior system, whereas in the US socialists have fewer successes and expect less.

You have this stark choice that everyone has to agree with, that if you aren't with Bush you're with the terrorists. This is just part of his sophistry though and has nothing to do with the way the excluded middle in that statement thinks or needs to respond to. Just because Bush uses sophistry constantly to support his rationalisations doesn't mean everyone has to be suckered into it.

Rhetorical statements made for public consumption often draw clear lines of distinction. Not everyone out there has the capacity to discern shades of grey and nebulous pronouncements aren't the things speechwriters dream about. After 9/11 the US realized it's ulnerability and part of the tough talk rhetoric acts as a deterrent to those who think we will just shrug and ignore it like the previous WTC bombing.

Indeed there weren't terrorists in Iraq before they were invaded. They had committed no terrorist attacks anywhere, certainly not in the US. As I said earlier the war turned many of them into all kinds of fighters, some of which fit into your narrow definition of terrorists. There are plenty of other though who would be freedom fighters, people wanting revenge, wanting jihad, wanting foreigners out, criminals, mercenaries, etc. Very few of those in the grey area would be any threat to the US and warrant any flypaper.

You should've been in one of the planes flying over the no-fly zone as the anti-aircraft shells burst nearby. Obviously, you don't find Saddam's financial rewards to families of Palestinian suicide bombers as having supported terrorism either.

The implication in the fly paper canard, that Al Qaeda is being drawn in and exhausted by being in Iraq. It may be true for some people but most of these other fighters are that dreaded excluded middle again. They didn't fight the US before and they don't fit into the flypaper theory, they are all these shades of greys that make the sophist arguments look bad.

You wish.

These fighters are remnants of Saddam's RG, the folks who regularly fired on our planes and many other Baathist groups. They aren't shouting "We give our blood and soul for you Saddam" because they were the quiet folks living in their homes minding their own business. They are the misfits whom are recruited and have no more promising future than to be promised a role in a post-US Iraq and who need not care about the future of Iraq when they can rally around some obsolete religious tenets and a murderous ex-dictator.

This is the price of being humane in regards to our military techniques. Yet had we been slaughterers, we'd be even more criticized and not the USA. We've come a long way in our military techniques for the sake of humanity.

As to Saddam killing people this is yet another excluded middle argument. You are saying that if we didn't invade then Saddam would have continued to kill lots of people so it was right to invade. One problem is you don't know how many he was supposed to have been killing and whether they did anything to deserve it. Syria and Egypt regularly torture people according to Amnesty international, you didn't seem to mind it when sending Al Qaeda prisoners over there to be tortured. How many radicals does Saudi Arabia and Egypt kill and torture? How many does Kuwait and Israel kill?

Well we know they eat babies in Israel, so don't forget those calculations. 300,000 bodies in mass graves and they all deserved it or the act of killing them is balanced because the whole middle east is comparatively savage?

Moral relativism at its finest!

Then you have to weigh up how many people were killed by the war itself and had their life damaged in other ways, and compare that to how they would have been before. Then you have to look at the millions dying in Africa of AIDS, wars, and starvation while no one cares much about their lives. It's nice to have this black/white argument that all of a sudden concern for human life was the reason for this invasion, but that obligates to to care about all the other people dying and being murdered elsewhere. Unfortunately they are also in the excluded middle to make Bush look he's saving people's lives. Spend a hundred billion on Africa if you are serious about human life.

I notice Bush's SOTU speech quotes about Africa and AIDS get far less play than his WMD quote. I wonder why?

Most of the casualties of the last ten years has been from the sanctions on Iraq, which was a bone headed f*ck up over weapons that were destroyed long ago. When you compare what Saddam did to how many the sanctions killed he comes off looking pretty good.

Another nice delusion. Saddam had plenty of money to feed everyone like kings, to by enough medicines to heal an army of children and sick folk. He chose to build twenty palaces instead. The sanctions bit is a nice little lie the left keeps telling itself. It's the same lies the gullible "human shields" believed until they wised up and split - disillusioned about the lies they had been fed about the "humane" and misunderstood Saddam regime.

The first Gulf War appears to have been a screw up by Bush I's ambassador who told Saddam the US wouldn't care if he invaded. Then the first war was to fix that screw up and resulted in sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands. The 300,000 you refer to was another screw up by Bush I who encouraged people to rise up and then they got slaughtered.

Amazing. Surely it was Chamberlain and Roosevelt's fault that Hitler invaded Poland, right?

As for the rise-up and slaughter that finished the first gulf war, Bush was unaware that Schwarzkopf had permitted helicopter flights of Iraqi officers. Permission which was used to attack Kurdish and Shiite settlements. Unfortunately, the number of those killed at this time don't make up the 300,000, instead, one sees that wholesale instituted extermination was going on well after the uprisings.

The Middle East has always been a mess. Applying this kind of false excluded middle logic makes it look simpler but it just leads to more disasters. France didn't want to be involved because they had this happen to them already in Algeria. Germany has had plenty of bad experience in occupying countries as has Russia. They foresaw this was going to be a disaster and they were right. They've had their share of leaders playing this excluded middle game and leading them to disaster and they don't want any more of it.

Not quite.

Germany and France had lucrative contracts with the Baathist regime. They lost billions of dollars cumulatively by the expulsion of Saddam. Not surprisingly, their economies have been hurt and they are simply loafing around waiting for another chance to set up new contracts with whatever group represents the Iraqis in business deals. They couldn't care less about the Iraqis, democracy or anything else. The middle east is simply viewed as a place to take photos of the savages while you're on your 4 week vacation and a place for euro companies to make big bucks.

;-)

SDAI-Tech1