millie wrote:How is it an oversimplification? Name one legitimate reason Bush is going to war with Iraq, other than the following:
1) To finish daddy's business.
2) To secure a substantial amount of oil, and to install a U.S. sympathizer to the presidency of Iraq.
3) To clean up the mess the United States created in the region by supporting Hussein with arms and funding in the 1980s.
1. He's a threat to world peace. Go ahead and cite that he hasn't invaded anyone in 12 years but his stance towards Israel and the west is still the same. He obviously hasn't been able to invade anyone because he's still recovering from his blunder in Kuwait. We (the UN) had hoped to contain him. Contain him by confiscating his WMDs and his long range missles, in effect rendering him harmless. But this has not worked. We can't leave a military force in the Gulf for years to contain him and inspections are not working. We can either deal with Saddam now by force, or we can wait years from now when he has nukes and has a greater army, which will result in far more deaths for all sides.
2. Whether you like to believe it or not, this is a dictatorship with a dictator who constantly abuses human rights in many forms and has no value of human life. Go read up on some of the stuff he has done and is still doing to this day.
One of his forms of torture is to have a drop of acid drop randomly from different parts of the ceiling. The suspect is forced to run around to avoid the drop, until he either tires and is killed, or gives up information.
Another form of torture, when a parent is being interrogated, is to bring their children into the interrogation room. They proceed to gouge out the children's eyes until the parent talks or until the kid dies.
Saddam even has someone who's job is soley to go around raping people.
Human rights activists who have seen first hand what Saddam has done have said quote "what's being done to these people can only be compared to what was done in the darkest hours of the holocaust."
Whether you think this is Bush's primary motivation or not, you can't deny that by us invading Iraq, the rape, slaugther, disfiguremant, and intimidation of thousands of Iraqi people WILL be stopped. There won't be a new tyrant put in his place. There will be a democratic government installed, there's this thing called the Iraqi National Congress...read up on it.
Is this where you point out how worse things might go on in a different country? Does that mean we can't stop it here? If you say we shouldn't stop the things Saddam is doing then don't EVER try to act like you sympathize with the people in Iraq that are going to be bombed. It completely undermines your position.
Yes, the bombings (80 percent precision guided bombings by the way) will most likely kill thousands, but in the long run the losses will be less. Weigh in the thousands of Iraqi people that are starving and malnurished, many of them because Saddam is more concerned with having weapons of mass destruction and forcing these sanctions upon himself than helping his own people. Weigh in what will happen if Saddam DOES get a nuke and passes it onto a faceless terrorist. Even IF you think he does not have any Al Qaeda connections whatsoever, we know that he provides funds to Hammas and other terrorists organizations- Hammas the organization that is responsible for the majority of suicide bombings in Israel. But wait, those are just jews, who cares if they're nuked?
3. Lastly, to simply uphold the UN as a meaningful body that is more than just words, which could in the long run deter other nations from taking aggressive actions and save even more lives.
The numbering thing didn't work out too well because I kept going off on tangants, but I think I provided one other reason.
About your oil argument, here's a nice article Metanis posted:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ar ... Jan23.html
Once Saddam is gone, sanctions will be lifted and wealth will be pouring in for the Iraqi people. This benefits us AND the Iraqi people, which personally I see nothing wrong with.
miir wrote: One tends to ruin their credibility when they feel the need to exaggerate estimated statistics by 400% to accentuate a point.
If I was trying to be factually precise I wouldn't have posted "thousands." I had seen an estimate that from 1995-2002 2-3 million had starved to death. That's OMGIAMRETARDEDCAUSEALOTISTWOWORDS of people. Those numbers speak for themselves, I don't need to "exaggerate estimates." I hadn't done the math, but I'm glad you've been able to prove me wrong on one issue, it just goes to show there's a first time for everything.
One also tends to ruin their credibility when they neglect to mention the other mitigating circumstances.
Here's some points:
Tons of people Afghanistan are starving to death.
Tons of people in Zimbabwe are starving to death.
On Sept 11 2001 an estimated 37000 children worldwide, died of startvation.
Millions of people in Southern Africa are at risk of dying from starvation.
So what? Relevance please. We're talking about N. Korea. None of those countries even remotely resembles N. Korea in regards to the relevant factors so I fail to see how that "mitigates" anything.
