Cindy Sheehan Has No Moral Authority

[Patroklos]

Has Saddam ever attacked the US, or threatened to?

Yes, he has not only illuminated but also shot at several of our (UN sactioned, not that that matters to me, but has to matter to you) aircraft over a few years time.

Then there is invading that third party for no good reason.

Thank you, come again.

[Ted Striker]

That's nice, so did he ever attack the US?

[Patroklos]

That's nice, so did he ever attack the US?

ummm....

Yes, he has not only illuminated but also shot at several of our

Is there a dumbass smilie?

[Ted Striker]

So did he ever attack the US?

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Patroklos
Yes, he has not only illuminated but also shot at several of our (UN sactioned, not that that matters to me, but has to matter to you) aircraft over a few years time.

Shooting at US aircrafts over one's own territory does not constitute an attack on the US.

Also, the "no-fly zones" were not only not sanctioned by the UN, but were completely illegal.

[Drake Tungsten]

Who cares if Iraq attacked the US? Japan's the only country who ever has, but that doesn't mean that every other war we ever fought was wrong.

[Mr. Harley]

Patroklos - simple question - and you have partial credibility due to your service - and total, once you volunteer for a ground deployment in Iraq - do you support the US intervening in other countries in "our national self-interest" as defined by our political leadership? (versus "defense")

I ask because if you do see that as justified, then you and I - and many of the posters here - have such a basic disagreement on premises that all we can do is argue. Neither you nor we will ever agree, our starting points have nothing in common except when the US is attacked.

But beware. Systems like that, as either Az, or Berz, or I can tell you - because we are working from ethical systems - have a vicious tendency to turn around and bite. What if Iran decided to help al Quaeda with a terrorist attack against the US?

The attack could be economic - do you have any idea what a coordinated outbreak of foot & mouth disease (which can be carried on your shoes) accross the US would do to our economy? And that would be easy. Hurting the US economy, and reducing our ability to support a large military capable of foreign intervention, would definitely by in the Mullahs' favor. Remember, they do have a "guided" democracy - the only limitations are that the Religious Caste gets to vet every candidate for his morals, and their are religious courts to insure morality. And of course in the US nobody runs on "Moral Values" and passing laws to impose them on others?

Az - I see you argument for Iraq 2 - in fact I voted the second time against Bush Sr. over Iraq 1 and f*cking the Kurds and Shia. However, and this is a very pertinent question - how can we justify Iraq and not the Sudan, whose human rights violations are on an even larger scale than Saddam's. Saddam, as a secular monster, had one major aim - maintaining power. You could get peace if you did not resist - and accepted the slow steady destruction of your local language/religion/culture.

In the Sudan - there's not much you can do about being Black (are they Bantu, I suspect so I am not sure). There is nothing they can do about their genocide/ethnicide - if they do not revolt, they are taken slaves, they are still starved and killed, etc. So if our war against Saddam was ethical, and I understand your argument I used to think along those lines - why did we not intervene in the Sudan first? That is where your premise starts to weaken.

You could argue, from my own premise - ethical realism - you go for the ethically justified war that you can get, not necessarily the ones you should fight, since not everybody is going to subscribe to not only ethics, but the tenets you base your ethics on. That starts to approach moral relativism - I am NOT calling you a moral relativist, but I suspect that trap is what has created many of them. Of course, I do recall that I stated I was an ethical realist because of those "confounding real world applications."

[Az]

Berz:

Sometimes people are just attacked to get what they have, and sometimes by people who dont have to lie about their motive(s). The Spanish wanted to rob and convert latin America and it did. If the Taliban handed over Al Qaeda, I'm pretty sure they'd still be in power. We were giving them money to wage a drug war and were not unhappy with the results. But this isn't about Afghanistan, its about Iraq.

The Spanish were mainly after the gold, while their stated reason was to go mainly to "convert the heathen". How's that as an example of a lie.

WRT Taliban, maybe you wouldn't attack, but that's because you'd lose the pretext.

All to some

Not all to some, but all to vast majority. It's not a contradiction, but a slight weakening of the original argument.

History reveals a pattern - the big swallow the small until the big becomes too bloated and gets lazy and keels over from heart disease.

eh? how's that connected to our debate?

So this "good" over rules the law? I'd agree with that on so many issues because of government corruption outlawing our freedoms, but the question is whether or not the mother of a son who died in a war resulting from lies has the moral authority to demand answers from those who lied. Seems obvious to me...

She deserves answers about how he died, and she deserves answers about the general war as much as all of the american people. Not more, or less.

A contract was violated in the extreme and we dont judge the guilty party innocent because we can see a "good" (and distant at best) result come of it.

A contract wasn't violated. could you give it a rest? And yes, deeds breaking the rules that result in a good result go unpunished all the times, and even get commended.

I'd remind you that we were in Afghanistan helping them gain their freedom from the USSR a few years back and that led to 9/11. So this "good" is so beholden to the future it is debatable, but not a justification to lie to others to purchase their existence.

Oh, but I don't consider your "helping freedom" back then to be ethical, dear. You weren't "helping freedom", you were helping a bunch of insane people from the dark ages. And it bit you in the ass.

Very true, "society" has taught us the government tells us what the Constitution says and most go along with it. But when we're talking about moral justification, majorioty rule is not the standard. The fault here lies with Congress, not Sheehan. It is Congress who should have the President answering for his conduct.

Yeah, but that's what YOU think. You see, if you want to drown in legalism, and "breaching of contract" etc., there is no real problem with the system here: If congress feels that president messed up, they can vote him off. If they don't and the voter disagrees, they can vote him off, as well.

Take a poll of the American people and you will see the difference between pure and impure motives. About half believe Iraq was justified, and alot of those people cant or wont even figure out Bush and his cronies lied. Most people agreed with Afghanistan and no lies were needed.

That's rich, coming from a libie. Since when the opinion of the majority of people mattered?

[Ted Striker]

Originally posted by Az
Since when the opinion of the majority of people mattered?

Since like, all the time.

The President reacted in a way towards Afghanistan that the overwhelming majority of the Americans approved of.

The people wanted action, they got it.

Like he said, no lies were needed. The motive was pure.

[Ted Striker]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
Who cares if Iraq attacked the US? Japan's the only country who ever has, but that doesn't mean that every other war we ever fought was wrong.

When the President goes before the American People and says, "we have to attack this nation because we are in imminent danger of them attacking us, BECAUSE they have these weapons of mass destruction," and then there are none of these threatening weapons that ever existed, that's kinda important.

There was never any imminent threat, now, then, in the future, or ever.

It's called lying.

[Ted Striker]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


Shooting at US aircrafts over one's own territory does not constitute an attack on the US.

Also, the "no-fly zones" were not only not sanctioned by the UN, but were completely illegal.

There was actually an operation that was conducted over Iraq months before Desert Storm 2. In the operation, the Air Force basically targeted Iraq's air defenses and destroyed them.

Preparation for an invasion? Or just a coincidence?

This happened, by the way, while the Administration still had, "all options on the table."

June 2002-March 2003

The frequency of US and British aerial attacks against targets in Iraq's “no-fly” zones increases dramatically as part of Operation Southern Focus. [New York Times, 7/20/2003; London Times, 5/29/2005; Washington Post, 1/15/2003; Time, 11/27/2002; Independent, 11/24/2002] According to the London Times, US and British planes drop twice as many bombs on Iraq during the second half of 2002 as they did during the entire year of 2001. [London Times, 5/29/2005] Between June 2002 and March 19, 2003, US and British planes fly 21,736 sorties over southern Iraq, dropping 606 bombs on 391 carefully selected targets. [New York Times, 7/20/2003; London Times, 6/27/2005; Washington Post, 1/15/2003] As Timur Eads, a former US special operations officer, notes in January 2003: “We're bombing practically every day as we patrol the no-fly zones, taking out air defense batteries, and there are all kinds of CIA and Special Forces operations going on. I would call it the beginning of a war.” [Boston Globe, 1/6/2003] The airstrikes, which occur primarily in the southern no-fly zone, are also becoming more strategic, targeting Iraq's surface-to-air missiles, air defense radars, command centers, communications facilities, and fiber-optic cable repeater stations. [Washington Post, 1/15/2003; Time, 11/27/2002; Independent, 11/24/2002] The repeater stations are bombed in order to disrupt the network of fiber-optic cables that transmit military communications between Baghdad and Basra and Baghdad and Nasiriya. “They wanted to neutralize the ability of the Iraqi government to command its forces; to establish control of the airspace over Iraq; to provide air support for Special Operations forces, as well as for the Army and Marine forces that would advance toward Baghdad; and to neutralize Iraq's force of surface-to-surface missiles and suspected caches of biological and chemical weapons,” the New York Times reports in July 2003. [New York Times, 7/20/2003] “We're responding differently,” one Pentagon official explains to Time magazine in November 2002. “[We're] hitting multiple targets when we're fired upon—and they're tending to be more important targets.” [Time, 11/27/2002] Some time after the invasion, a US general reportedly says (see July 17, 2003) at a conference at Nevada's Nellis Air Force Base “that he began taking out assets that could help in resisting an invasion at least six months before war was declared.” [San Francisco Chronicle, 6/19/2005 Sources: Charlie Clements]
People and organizations involved: Britain, United States

So here we have our leader going before the world preaching peace as an option, but the Air Force is dropping more bombs than ever before. Does that just happen to be a coincidence???

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_timeline_of_the_2003_invasion_of_iraq&general_topic_areas=aerialAttacks

Disgusting.

[Berzerker]

Az

The Spanish were mainly after the gold, while their stated reason was to go mainly to "convert the heathen". How's that as an example of a lie.

They said gold was not a motive? The Church went to convert, the King and his military went for the gold. Where is the lie?

WRT Taliban, maybe you wouldn't attack, but that's because you'd lose the pretext.

Which makes the pretext rather important.

Not all to some, but all to vast majority. It's not a contradiction, but a slight weakening of the original argument.

If you say so But you're still overstating it, so get weaker with your argument.

eh? how's that connected to our debate?

Just showing that many wars are fought by peoples for moral reasons and dont need lies to justify their actions.

She deserves answers about how he died, and she deserves answers about the general war as much as all of the american people. Not more, or less.

So what is your problem with her?

A contract wasn't violated. could you give it a rest? And yes, deeds breaking the rules that result in a good result go unpunished all the times, and even get commended.

Once the good is realised, it'll be decades before we know if this had a good result. But lying to create a war isn't one of these commendable deeds. And why should we ignore the contract involved here? Weren't you guys arguing that since he signed up, he was bound by a contract?

Oh, but I don't consider your "helping freedom" back then to be ethical, dear. You weren't "helping freedom", you were helping a bunch of insane people from the dark ages. And it bit you in the ass.

So why do you see "good" in liberating Iraq but not Afghanistan from the USSR? If this endeavor results in a US city being nuked in 20 years, what will happen to your "good"?

Yeah, but that's what YOU think. You see, if you want to drown in legalism, and "breaching of contract" etc., there is no real problem with the system here: If congress feels that president messed up, they can vote him off. If they don't and the voter disagrees, they can vote him off, as well.

Umm...yeah...thats what I think, prove me wrong. So far you said all policians lie. That justifies lying?

That's rich, coming from a libie. Since when the opinion of the majority of people mattered?

You asked for the difference between Iraq and Afghanistan wrt pure motives, I said public support is a good indicator of that difference. So I was not placing value on the opinion of the majority, but on the opinion of an overwhelming majority. There's a difference between a fabricated simple majority and an overwhelming majority. Morality may be more safely derived from the latter than the former.

[Ted Striker]

I hear news that the military is replacing the Interceptor body armor with a new body armor because the Interceptor is being defeated by the insurgents. Whether this is by explosives, or some kind of armor piercing round, I dont' know. I thought there was a fund setup to help buy them the armor, but I can't find it. If anybody has a link, let me know.

In the meantime, instead of buying silly "I Support our Troops" SUV car magnets, put the money where the mouth is and buy them a care package or something else they can actually use.

http://www.operationusocarepackage.org/site/pp.asp?c=ikLVJ7MSKvH&b=569679

I'd hit it, fully armored.

[binTravkin]

Another stinking thread..

[Mr. Harley]

Well, you'd have to take off SOME of the armor. Wouldn't you?