Atheist claim: War is caused by religion if participants are religious.

[kentonio]

Saddam was a vicious dictator who the US had previously supported who kept his people in oppression, started aggressive wars against neighbours and lets not forget used chemical weapons against his own people and his neighbours. This could have been a highly moral war in the same vein as the first Gulf War, but instead it became exactly the squalid corrupt mess you describe. Please understand however that for many of us who did support the war, we did so for good reasons.

[Jon Miller]

Actually, I think there is more good cause to think that GW1 was an immoral war than GW2 (based on the reasons).

It was just that GW1 was prosecuted in a good fashion and GW2 was a mess.

JM

[Jon Miller]

I am great at double posting.

GW1 was based on political/military conflict between nations where we had no real business and there was no clear 'good' side (Although people were freer in Kuwait). You could argue that it caused GW2. Additionally, the reason why we stepped in was heavily based on oil/PR.

GW2 was based on removing an agressive antagonist (due to GW1). We were worried that he was getting serious weapons (or had). Additionally, the goal was to implement democracy.

JM

[MikeH]

WTF.

[Felch]

A broken clock is right twice a day.

Indeed, except the Pope isn't a clock, he's a human being who applied a rational method for determining whether or not a war was justified. Incidentally, it was Augustine of Hippo who started formulating the doctrine.

[kentonio]

The only one of the four tests that this fails under is..

The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.

..and that only because the US ****ed up the post war so badly. The pope could not have known going in that that was the case.

[Felch]

For me the biggest fail was the complete stripping of power from any Ba'ath party member, leaving Iraq without any established leaders and in a Somalia like state. That and the complete lack of rationale post war planning. We went to topple a dictator and stayed to... completely reshape the entire country in our image?

So we should have invaded Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein and his criminal Ba'athist regime, and then left the Ba'athists in power? I agree that Iraq didn't have any decent political leaders aside from the Ba'athists (unlike post-war Germany when we deNazified it), but that's just one more reason to not invade a country. We didn't have a good post-war plan, aside from installing that twerp Chalabi.

[Felch]

What about

the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;

Hussein wasn't a threat to us at all. Even if he still had WMDs, he had no delivery mechanism. He was a bottled up tyrant, who couldn't even fly planes around his own country without getting them shot down. He was not an aggressor in any sense of the word, nor could he inflict any lasting, grave, or certain damage to the community of nations.

...not to mention...

all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;

We bullied and threatened him to give up weapons he didn't even have. We were not trying to find a peaceful solution, we were looking for an excuse to kill people.

[kentonio]

So we should have invaded Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein and his criminal Ba'athist regime, and then left the Ba'athists in power? I agree that Iraq didn't have any decent political leaders aside from the Ba'athists (unlike post-war Germany when we deNazified it), but that's just one more reason to not invade a country. We didn't have a good post-war plan, aside from installing that twerp Chalabi.

The problem was that huge numbers of people who were party members held positions of responsibility yet had no particular allegiance to Hussain. They were party members because that's how you got along in the country in that period. Automatically stripping away jobs from people based on something so arbitary was ridiculous, and a lot of significant US figures protested repeatedly about it.

The occupations affected by the de-Ba'athification policy include:

All civil servants in any government ministry affiliated with the Ba'ath Party[1]
Occupations involving education (teachers and university professors)[1]
Medical practitioners[1]
All personnel affiliated with the Ministry of Defense and similar intelligence or military entities of government

I mean come on! Just with the military alone..

Specifically, the Iraqi military was affected by Order No. 2. The Order called for the complete dissolution of the Iraqi military, and reportedly resulted in the unemployment and loss of pensions of approximately 500,000 individuals

Half a million men with military training stripped of their livelihood and pensions and left to fend for themselves in a deeply unstable country? It hardly takes a genius to foresee just how ****ing retarded that was going to be.

[kentonio]

Hussein wasn't a threat to us at all. Even if he still had WMDs, he had no delivery mechanism. He was a bottled up tyrant, who couldn't even fly planes around his own country without getting them shot down. He was not an aggressor in any sense of the word, nor could he inflict any lasting, grave, or certain damage to the community of nations.

He'd already inflicted that damage on the community of nations with his wars on Iran and Kuwait. You can argue he wasn't a threat any more which is probably true, but he continued to inflict grave damage on his own people which for me is justification enough.

...not to mention...

We bullied and threatened him to give up weapons he didn't even have. We were not trying to find a peaceful solution, we were looking for an excuse to kill people.

Sorry but that's untrue. He did have those weapons at one point because he used them, not only on his olwn people but on the Iranians. He may not have held them at the end, but at the time of the war it was impossible for those of us outside the intelligence services to know that. The reports that have come out since about the administration deliberately building a lie to start that war, is why so many of us who were pro-war now believe that entire group should be tried for waging aggressive war and potential war crimes.

[Elok]

Saddam was a vicious dictator who the US had previously supported who kept his people in oppression,

Describes at least a quarter of the governments on earth,

started aggressive wars against neighbours

A decade before our invasion, and already answered by our last invasion,

and lets not forget used chemical weapons against his own people and his neighbours.

Again: how many years before this point? All these ostensible reasons were obvious excuses for the arrogant neo-con agenda behind the invasion. Ridiculous as it is, they seem to have sincerely believed they could squeeze this unwieldy mess of a country into a modern Western democracy by brute force. As we're still trying to do with Afghanistan. It won't work in either case. I'm guessing you have reasons of your own for still sticking to that story, but I can't imagine what.

Saddam was also sitting on an obviously unstable situation--a country ready to tear itself apart, with at least one neighbor standing by to help with the tearing. While he was in power, odious as he was, that massive rupture could not occur. The Shrub's misguided policy of Baath-purging is almost beside the point; we unleashed a massive sectarian civil war and the consequences have still not all played out. The Kurds in the north are pissing Turkey off, Iran is still waiting to effectively annex the country, and there's no particularly good reason to believe their current government will stay strong and just, to the extent it can be called either now. Millions of people were either forced to flee or outright killed. This should all have been easily foreseeable. But it wasn't, or else the people in power simply didn't care.

[Elok]

He may not have held them at the end, but at the time of the war it was impossible for those of us outside the intelligence services to know that. The reports that have come out since about the administration deliberately building a lie to start that war, is why so many of us who were pro-war now believe that entire group should be tried for waging aggressive war and potential war crimes.

Seriously? I was about twenty at the time, knew almost nothing about the situation, but I could tell they were bull****ting us. "This secular dictator is aligned with Al-Qaeda--take our word for it! No? Well then, imagine what terrible things he could theoretically be doing in these desert trailers we have fuzzy satellite photos of. It could be absolutely anything, but we like to think it's WMD. Which he will somehow deploy against us, halfway around the world, almost certainly getting himself annihilated in return, just because he's that cartoonishly evil. C'mon! 9/11! Eh, whatever. It's not like any of you have the balls to contradict us anyway."

I just assumed they had some real reason they weren't telling us, because I'd heard Colin Powell was a very experienced and competent soldier and couldn't imagine such a person going along with such a transparently moronic scheme. Ah, the naivete of youth.

[kentonio]

Your argument suggests that it would be better for a country to live under deep oppressive than undergo the changes necessary to restore a more normal situation. It's the same argument that was used to defend western support for dictators across the Middle East and elsewhere and it's a distasteful one when the more you think about it.

[Elok]

Your argument suggests that it would be better for a country to live under deep oppressive than undergo the changes necessary to restore a more normal situation. It's the same argument that was used to defend western support for dictators across the Middle East and elsewhere and it's a distasteful one when the more you think about it.

A "more normal situation," by which I assume you mean a functional democracy, was never on the table in the first place. These people (or at least the vast majority of them) never wanted democracy. They have no democratic tradition, and their main belief system doesn't make distinctions between religious and secular power. We propped up their secular tyrants for ages because the religious kind spooked us, but that doesn't mean we were right to knock over one of the few dictators who stood up without us in pursuit of a quixotic fantasy. My argument is that we shouldn't have toppled Saddam for the same reason we shouldn't drive the Kims out of NK: we have no idea what kind of hellish chaos would result, but we know it will be worse than the existing order.

[Dinner]

If ken is offering to answer biology questions, how did mammals go from laying eggs to giving birth to live young? Were there intermediate mammals that were ovoviviparous, like sharks? Does it have something to do with marsupials?

Probably in a manner very similar to these skinks in Australia.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1308772/Evolution-action-Scientists-discover-lizards-verge-leap-egg-laying-live-births.html