Are you willing to fight and/or die for your country?

[shift]

lol

I think we all should make use of the Quote option (me the first, I admmit it ) to make sure ppl know who we are talking to.

This confussion thing is happening a lot lately.
It\'s somewhat funny anyway.

[Crazy_Ivan]

isoFlux Wrote:you call those puppets in office in Iraq their "OWN PRESIDENT"?

You mean Allawi... he\'s just a temporary guy. But he has something that the other \'candidates\' (Paul Brenner and more important, Chalabi) didn\'t have: Because he hasn\'t been publicly active in either of the main ethnic groups (which Chalabi is), and because as yet hasn\'t messed around with US intelligence info (Chalabi knew that they had Saddam hours before the official press release), and seems to have a clean record on taking bribes etc he is a better candidate than any of the perople the US put there before he was put in that position...
Chalabi was kicked because (officially) he had done something with US funds, but i think the real reason that the US wanted to get rid of him was to give the sunnites the message that they would still have something to say in the government. The only valueable things Chalabi had to offer was political experience, and being trusted in the north at the time the US needed it.

Quote:again, read your history. the US has a knack for inserting a puppet into a public, powerful office of a foreign subsidiary, and then assasinating, capturing or invading them later. this is no different. that \"president\" will be in power so long as he wears an American suit and praises Western values. when he doesnt, or decides to go maverick on our ass, he\'ll dissapear from the radar.

They explicitly wanted an elected government... so they will have to deal with the fact that Allawi leaves the stage when the situation returns to normal. If they don\'t want that, why did they opt for elections in the first place...

Quote:where are they? where are all these weapons? do they have them up their ass? what were they (the mass media) screaming before the war started \"THEY HAVE WMDs AND WILL USE THEM ON US UNLESS WE ACT NOW NOW NOW!\" then we get there, and we find, what, 2-3 barrels of industrial waste? lol... sorry, the gap between what politicians say and actual truth is quite large.

Read the same history books you ask us to read... but not the US \'censored\' version that ignores anything their former friends did when they were on the\'good\' side.

In iran there are still the ruins of the contaminated villages that were on the frontline... Official casualty count for the iranian side is around 100,000 EXCLUDING civilians. And there were still corroded chemical rounds laying around the countryside when the americans went in in 2003

You have hundreds of soldiers that have various undiagnoseable health problems, of which experts say that they were caused by exposure to Sarin, VX and some of the other stuff that was stored in some of the bunkers that were blown up in 1991. The only reason the DOD doesn\'t want to tell the truth is that they are afraid of being sued by family members.

Let\'s face it... you have a power hungry lunatic that has proven to be capable of gassing his own citizens, and has the means of delivering conventional and chemical warheads (as he didn\'t clean his stores the way you wanted) on either your allies (Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Kuwait) or on major airbases that are used by your own forces. All of the UN teams that you have sent there to check if he cleaned up his stuff were being eavedropped and denied access to key installations.

Let\'s play the whole thing over again from the middle of 2002 or so... but with a slighly different plot
The following scenario is based on some guesswork and general info on the region, but is (i think) somewhat realistic.
Saddam gets murdered by a bodyguard or some suicide commando (highly unlikely, but possible)
The most likely scenario that will happen is the following:
Both the kurds and the shiites will take advantage of the situation. The kurdish region will declare itself independent, and most likely will send their troops to reclaim Mosul and Kirkuk. The Turks don\'t want this to happen and will almost certainly react on this... This will cause a long-term problem for the US, as the main pipelines from the russian oil republics go through the eastern part of Turkey.
The shiite part, lacking a government structure will try to keep itself going as far as possible, but eventually will try to get itself into a larger alliance-like union with Iran (which the US absolutely wants to prevent, as tere is a lot of oil there)
For the central part there are 2 possibilities:
1: Both halves will fight over it, with the possibility that the sunnite population will eventually go for a desparate alliance with the kurds to keep their freedoms. This alliance won;t stay long though, but i won\'t speculate further on this...
2: The central part will eventually join their political mates in Syria, adding a lot of population there, and giving a huge intellect boost to Syrian defense projects and other things that will prove problematic for Israel.

Which situation is worse for the USA, a pissed-off europe and UN, with an united iraq, or a situation that can evolve in one of the worst ethno-religuous conflicts in human history.

[isoFlux]

my post above was mostly aimed at Yellowbelly. ill use quotes next time, sorry

@Crazy Ivan
Saddam used chemical and biological weapns in the war against Iran. the easiest way to find that out is to look at the reciepts. the US fully supported and induced that war through Saddam. whoopdy-doo. but the question is.... did he have the weapons of mass destruction to attack the U.S.? if so, then US troops and UN inspectors would have found them, right? not used chemical rounds from the 80\'s. not soldiers with health problems. but actual hardcore evidence of Iraq having weapons and plans to use them on the US. we have found nothing... repeat.. nothing to support this. all we have are a few scientists that say \"well, we kinda had plans, but nothing was really going on.\" and a short history of chemical warfare (that we provided). this was the biggest intelligence faliure in human history. worse than sending undercover japanese-americans into vietnam (twice). he had weapons in the past, but did not have any at the time of the invasion, or the immediate capabilities to generate and use such weapons. you need to be 100% sure of the facts before you invade a country and destory peoples\' homes. judging from what the media and politicians portrayed and what we have found out during the occupation, i\'d say there are some MAJOR differences.

peemptive-strikes are not always the best choice. \"if its not broken, don\'t fix it.\" comes to mind. no doubt many people suffered under the Sunni regime, but is it our place to run in and stir that shit up without the approval of the rest of the world?

if you think any politician is free from corruption, and doesn\'t tailor to his/her agenda to their supporters (political, and economic), you are kidding yourself. nothing is free, not even votes. politics in the media is like a shallow soap opera, while the real policy-making and voting is a delicate, dangerous, and restrictive web of red-tape and corporate thugs.

if Saddam were to be killed in mid-2002 i\'m sure the world would have a different view on what kind of intervention would be needed in the Middle East. it would be a reactive, calculated affair, not a brash, single-track invasion by a country with an ego bigger than it\'s future.

[The_Punisher]

Turbo, you do realize that Bill Clinton has **LOST** more wars then both of the Bushes combined have fought?


And for chrissake, stop throwing the word Fascist around. It has no bearing on this at all!

[=D.C.L.I=TuRb0jUg3nD]

To make one thing clear to you good ol boys being sceptical of us soft-on-terrorists- Euro-wussie-commie-lefties: Everyone is glad to see Saddam out of power. You gotta be a fucking moron trying to impress us with examples of what an evil bastard Saddam was. We know.

It is the motives behind and the arrogant refusal to cooperate with the rest of the world in ousting him (you know: with minimal bloodshed – yeah, we wussie euros are strangely weird that way), that bugs us.

I bet all of us here admires the fuck out of the 1000s of US troops stationed in that hell-hole. They are doing a heroic job of trying to protect a largely peace-loving Iraqi public from those satanic suicide bombers from hell.

Basically, its Vietnam all over again. Too bad it aint the 60s again, cause then you kids would care enough to make a difference.

*Edit* Sorry ?bout all the swearing and pathos, I had a bit too much of red wine and bad TV when I wrote that.

[=D.C.L.I=TuRb0jUg3nD]

The_Punisher Wrote:Turbo, you do realize that Bill Clinton has **LOST** more wars then both of the Bushes combined have fought?

Your sense of scope is way off, as usual. You?re actually counting wars?

The_Punisher Wrote:And for chrissake, stop throwing the word Fascist around. It has no bearing on this at all!

Im trowing it at the views you profess (let the UN bash those not in order dribble), not the US.

[Yellowbelly]

isoflux, you don\'t trust any senator or president but you only bash 1? Why would you care about politics if you don\'t agree with anyone?

The Iraqi presidents are puppets? Have you researched this? I have never heard about this. If it was completely true, I imagine that I would have heard some other liberals screaming about it right now. As far as I know they are nominated from Iraq themselves. I seriously doubt that America hired some iraqi immigrant to hold iraq\'s office? Not likely at all. I don\'t recall ONE instance where America hired a president, then later took over the country. We did a pretty jacked up thing to mexico but other than that, can\'t really think of any.

People bashed Bush about how there\'s no WMD\'s in Iraq or barely when it started but did they go into investigation about? Did the media go into investigation? Did they somehow get CIA files? NO they just bashed it without giving any support whatsoever. That\'s what most people do if not all. Like I said before, the invasion of Iraq was ALL about WMD\'s like the Media, other liberals, and people around here think and say it is. Were mainly doing UN\'s job for them, ousting a threat to allied nations. He\'s been aiding terrorist and let them stay in his country. The reason why there are still fighters in Iraq is because he HIRED them. He planned this insurgency when iraq was about to be invaded.

They were right, there were no WMD\'s in Iraq. I didn\'t think there would be when Saddam Hussein had 8 YEARS! 8 YEARS to hide them or sell them. We do have information that Syria took them and there\'s a lot of evidence that Russia moved them. That could explain why Russia was against the war for the longest time

[Big-Al]

Yellowbelly Wrote:isoflux, you don\'t trust any senator or president but you only bash 1? Why would you care about politics if you don\'t agree with anyone?

well i sujested the illuminati but that was imediatly rejected:roll:

[ElvenKind]

Ok. Let\'s all take a step back and breathe some before we continue posting. While breathing read the following guidelines below :

• Less cussing (Yeah, I\'m looking at you Turbo )
• Less Euro vs US
• More "Would you fight for your country"

To those of you who found my list a bit long and didn\'t have the stamina to go through it, here is the short version :
Get back on topic. Now!

If you guys fail to follow through on this I will lock this thread in a heartbeat. Cmon guys. A bit more civilized discussion please.

[=D.C.L.I=TuRb0jUg3nD]

ElvenKind Wrote:Less cussing (Yeah, I\'m looking at you Turbo )

I already said I was sorry, you f***er!