hmmm...
thank you for the replies so far. At least my post was not deleted now. Thanks for that.
Yes I am Dutch and a paying member of our Green Left Party, which is in fact of the highest democratic standards, intelligent, pro-environment, and for a free exchange of opinions. To add: they stand for a good system of social benefits, care for the elderly, and a decent and accessible health insurance for everyone, which we (still) have. However, these venerable institutions are under threat from the current Dutch rightwing politicians, who have fallen under the spell of Marvin Olasky and Karl Rove somehow.
Going into Iraq was a horrific mistake. Doing so without the UN backing made it all worse. Doing so with some 25,000 'privatized interrogation specialists and linguists' (er...mercenaries IMHO) made it giga-bad.
So far, the upshot is that some 12,000 innocent Iraqi women, men and children have been killed, maimed, burned and evaporated, in addition to 1,000 coalition troops.
Meanwhile, no WMDs and no ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda have been established (according to US investigative committees).
Yes, you found out the sociopath Saddam. That is a plus. But it is perfectly possible that in the Iraq elections a triumph will be achieved by the Shi'ites and the Communist Party. Iraq well may be become a sister country to Iran. But hey, the USA wanted democracy, and may get it this way.
Where was the US when Rumsfeld was enjoying his tea with Saddam in the 80s while doing business, and the same dictator killed his own people by the 10,000s?
Dick Cheney is rightly looked upon as an outright war profiteer. He handed out contracts to Halliburton and KBR (his own people, to whom he will return eventually, no doubt) for re-building bridges and buildings which had yet to be bombed...
Meanwhile, Osama Bin Laden is still free. And Afghanistan is in rapid decline under the token US standing army. The warlords are in charge, and heroin production is sharply rising there. And the Taliban are re-grouping too.
America and Bush jr. had the sympathy of the world after 9/11. With a historic gesture Bush then could have united the whole civilized world and have undertaken a concerted effort against terrorism. To leave Afghanistan half-finished (thus sending it back to its old state) and going into Iraq, the result is that the USA have lost this worldwide sympathy wholesale. That is deeply saddening, because another route could have been taken. World terrorism has risen sharply after Iraq, this proves that the War On Terror is a debacle. Rest assured that it will remain thus.
Our own Prime Minister, mr Balkenende, chose to march along with Bush and Blair. He too lied about the available intelligence before the war, and eventually, be it shortly, be it in years, he will have to face the facts.
Mr Blair, incidentally, gave a new twist to British Law. Apart from 'guilty' or 'not guilty', he invented the 'I Acted In Good Faith' escape phrasing. Unbelievable.
The only good thing to come out of this mess, this Pandora's Box that the West opened, is that George W. Bush will not see a second term as President. The polls are not in his favor anymore, and never before has a President been able to re-gain the precious 'swing voters' in so short a time span, surely not with the economic figures being what they are.
I'll raise a toast to John F. Kerry then. Cheers!
The artist formerly known as the leftist Dutchman.
Bulls@&T. Read correctly. There were ties between Iraq and Al Quaeda, but not necessarily between the 9/11 incident and Iraq. Uranium and other items HAVE been found even if the leftist American media and even more leftist European media refuse to report it.
Is there nothing to do in Holland?
I thought your introduction, of sorts, was informative, and I have a couple of initial questions:
1. You mention Marvin Olasky as if the name itself is some sort of self-apparent epithet. Many on this site think he's one of the most brilliant thinkers on social matters to come along in many a year.
What shortcomings, specifically, do you find with "compassionate conservatism" as he describes it. Not talking about how Bush has or hasn't implemented policy based on Olasky's tenents, but rather his beliefs themselves.
2)Your statement that there were, "no ties between Iraq and Al-Quaeda" is false, and no "investigative committee" has stated otherwise. Overall, intermittent and/or continual ties between the two is one thing, explicit Iraqi assistance in the specific attacks that took place on September 11, 2001 is another.
I can post here on a daily basis that I want to see someone hit John Kerry in the face with an egg, but if someone reads this and, inspired by my hatred of Sen. Kerry, does just that, the fact that I wasn't directly involved (and, furthermore, that I liked the result of the attack after it took place) doesn't make me completely innocent. Anyway, your comment is a common misperception.
3) You mention the chance, post 2001, for the US to "unite the world" to undertake "concerted efforts" against terrorism.
How would this have happened? How could it?
International animosity against the US long predated 9/11. Why would the death of approx. 3,000 in a terror attack change this?
See, I think most European animosity in particular stems from the US's historical relctance to have reasonable foreign policy determined by the opinion of others. Even if de facto anti-semites in places like the French government think otherwise, I think it's reasonable for the United States to support Israel in the face of the unrelenting pressure (of one form or another) they've faced ever since multiple Arab countries spit in the face of the UN's wishes and attacked the historically-rooted Jewish state in 1948.
So, some deluded radicals plow planes into buildings one day and the US is supposed to alter it's reasonable policy supporting a Jewish state in the Middle East? You and I both know that, at it's core, any sort of "concerted effort" against "terrorism" would have included international demands that the US "rethink" it's support of Israel.
Sorry, the most powerful nation in the history of the world does not need to succumb to cheap blackmail, does not need to alter long-standing, reasonable policy.
Add to this the fact---fact---that the UN has proven little better than the League of Nations did in enforcing it's will in troubled areas of the world, and the US acting in concert with like-minded nations outside of the auspices of the UN made more and more sense with every French-led effort to protect the sweetheart deals French oil companies had with the Hussein regieme...uh, I mean "sensibly counterbalance arrogant US policy in the region."
Anyway, I know this is long-winded, but I hope you take the time to address these points. Best of luck to you on this site, if only because you're vastly outnumbered.
(PS--People here are not kidding when they say they themselves could never go to a Left-leaning site and do this; they'd be banned so fast your head would spin. Last I checked, this thread had nearly 400 replies...)
Where was the US when Franklin Roosevelt was having tea with Joseph Stalin, a dictator who killed millions of his own people. International politics sometimes creates strange bedfellows. One day a country can be classified as our friend and the next day they're classified as our enemy.
Dick Cheney is the Vice President and does not award contracts. We in America do not believe that corporations which are owned by common people (shareholders) and employ millions of workers, are evil. Halliburton is one of the few companies in the world with the ability and expertise to do the jobs it contracted for. Do you think the US would hire a French company - bwahahahaha!
Oh? Which US investigative committees were those? The only ones that have made any comment have concluded that there were ties. Do you have access to other secret committees the rest of us don't know about?
Now, here's your homework in case you're still reading, Junior: How many people would have died at the hands of the Hussein regime in Iraq between March 2003 and today? I'll lay you odds, based on past atrocities, it'd be a considerably higher number than 12,000. How many would have starved to death, or died from disease, because moneys from the UN Oil-for-Fraud program that should have gone for food and medicine went into the pockets of corrupt bastards around the world instead?
No WMDs? Oh, those binary-agent-capable shells that the Polish forces keep tripping over, those don't count? The traces of Sarin that keep turning up, what about those? And y'know, even then, may I remind you, oh Carver of Clogs, that it wasn't our place to prove that he had them, it was Hussein's place to prove that he didn't. The United Nations resolutions gave us UN authority to go in there and clean house, not that we really needed or wanted it. But your EU friends, primarily France, Germany, and your next-door neighbor Belgium, were making too damn many euros off selling Saddam arms and getting kickbacks from the Oil-for-Fraud program.
We, the United States, with the Coalition of the Willing by our side, showed the UN to be the ineffective collection of fourth-rate tinpot dictators that it really is.
Oh yeah, one more thing. I find it amusing to get lectured on "civil discourse" and "free exchange of opinions" by a Dutch Green...does the name Pim Fortuyn ring a bell? The leftist whackjob fellow traveler of yours that gunned him down sure as hell didn't believe in a "free exchange of opinions."
And now, it's time for your stint as a cat toy. Beauregard...eviscerate.
}:-)4
So? How is that a bad thing?