ChileMass
Active member
Wow - a big ooo-rah for Brian Contosh and his Marine unit. I am 100% in support of our troops and am trying to remain 100% in support of W and the Defense Dept., but these days it is getting tougher. I am in complete accord that somehow, some way, we need to HELP bring those reactionary elements of the Islamic world into the 21st Century. I'm sure many will say this is blood for oil, and it doesn't suck that for the next little while we get to direct the future of the world's 2nd-leading oil producer. But this is about security. None of us are secure until the last of these Al-Qaeda motherf-----s is stamped out. OK, we can't prove Saddam had anything to do with 9-11, and it looks like he may not have had any WMDs when we went in there last year. But - given the opportunity, he would have been involved in either or both, and there are 150,000 murdered Iraqi political prisoners in the last decade alone who would stand up and applaud the US Marines, except they can't because they're dead.
Proof of Saddam's WMD intentions - for those of you who may have forgotten or were too young at the time, look on CNN.com sometime at the archival info about the 1980 Israeli Air Force's surprise bombing of the Iraqi "nuclear power plant" (built by our allies the French, btw) which destroyed Saddam's attempts 24 years ago in developing nukes to use aginst the Iranians, the Israelis, the Kurds and the Turks. Combine that with a disastrous 10-year war against Iran, repeatedly gassing Kurdish areas, invading Kuwait, etc., and then tell me there was no reason to go in and dig that murdering pig of a dictator out of his spider hole.
The majority of Iraqis, and the majority of Muslims want to coexist peaceably with the West. The problem is that if moderate Muslims are seen as soft on non-Muslims, they are persecuted (or worse) by the radicals, who are actually a tiny minority. Note that when the statue of Saddam fell a year ago, there were hundreds of Baghdad policemen who showed up to work (they needed a paycheck, too) but had to soon stop publicly cooperating with the Allies because they and their families became targets. If the US can root out the radicals and create some semblance of normalcy (utilities running, schools open, police functioning, local government) the majority of the Iraqis will once again publicly support the invasion. However, they're like anyone else - if the nicest army in the world was parked in my neighborhood, I'd still be counting the days until they left and I could run my own affairs.......
This isn't our grandparent's world where we can sit here in North America and ignore the issues of people in the Middle East. And the Internet has made us even closer. Personally, I am amazed that there hasn't been a wave of suicide bombings here in the States. Truly, Al-Qaeda is everywhere, and since they are in Iraq now (re: Nick Berg), they are fair game, and we will take the battle to them. This is a fight worth taking on.
Proof of Saddam's WMD intentions - for those of you who may have forgotten or were too young at the time, look on CNN.com sometime at the archival info about the 1980 Israeli Air Force's surprise bombing of the Iraqi "nuclear power plant" (built by our allies the French, btw) which destroyed Saddam's attempts 24 years ago in developing nukes to use aginst the Iranians, the Israelis, the Kurds and the Turks. Combine that with a disastrous 10-year war against Iran, repeatedly gassing Kurdish areas, invading Kuwait, etc., and then tell me there was no reason to go in and dig that murdering pig of a dictator out of his spider hole.
The majority of Iraqis, and the majority of Muslims want to coexist peaceably with the West. The problem is that if moderate Muslims are seen as soft on non-Muslims, they are persecuted (or worse) by the radicals, who are actually a tiny minority. Note that when the statue of Saddam fell a year ago, there were hundreds of Baghdad policemen who showed up to work (they needed a paycheck, too) but had to soon stop publicly cooperating with the Allies because they and their families became targets. If the US can root out the radicals and create some semblance of normalcy (utilities running, schools open, police functioning, local government) the majority of the Iraqis will once again publicly support the invasion. However, they're like anyone else - if the nicest army in the world was parked in my neighborhood, I'd still be counting the days until they left and I could run my own affairs.......
This isn't our grandparent's world where we can sit here in North America and ignore the issues of people in the Middle East. And the Internet has made us even closer. Personally, I am amazed that there hasn't been a wave of suicide bombings here in the States. Truly, Al-Qaeda is everywhere, and since they are in Iraq now (re: Nick Berg), they are fair game, and we will take the battle to them. This is a fight worth taking on.
