 |
|
You are not logged in! F.A.Q Log in Register |
 |
|
 |
 (nobody)...and 358 guests Last 5 registered Oplandisks nothingstar N_loop yipe foxtrotromeo Browse members... |
 |
Members 8025Messages 2614103 Today 0 Topics 127542 |
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
well if you read my earlier comments i wasn't responding to you but to pantalaimon, you somehow made it your business to debate me form than on. -- vice versa? isreali offered to give up a lot of land int he early 90's during the oslo peace accords. arafat agreed with it at first than went back on his word and later refused any further deals. ever since the terrorism and anti israeli attacks got worse |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
whatever im done with this. i just gave some arguments against the israeli bashing to give some counter arguments instead of the usual one sidedness of this board. thats all |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
"well if you read my earlier comments i wasn't responding to you but to pantalaimon, you somehow made it your business to debate me form than on." well, if you re-read your post... you didnt hit reply to anyone. and you didnt specify who you were talking to. since I was actively participating at the time that you posted, I could only assume you were including me. and dont tell me israel doesnt hate the palistinians just as much, cause thats BS and you know it. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
I dont like this thread. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
2 WORDS "ETHIC CLEANSING" |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
This had me EL'in 'o El. Bit late innit? It's like having 4 men on a stage, watching 3 get abused and then have them close the curtain when it's the turn of the 4th guy and have some guy, with the face of a hollywood crook and an evil pr grin, walk up the stage in front of the closed curtains saying: "Hey people, nothing happened okay!" |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
bah wtf |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
glad they are finding ways to keep their insanity :) |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
Haha, what is with the way the reporter is talking in the voiceover on that clip? It sounds completely spasticated. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
yeah i know, dunno what is up with it. *keep their sanity. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
I don't know if either of these links have been posted yet; apologies if they have... (for our beloved troops) Hooray! and . I say "US Marine", I suspect "ANTI-AMERICAN, FREEDOM-HATING, PINKO CRYPTO-COMMIE BLEEDING-HEART LIBERAL SCUM IF HE LOVES IRAQ SO MUCH WHY DOESN'T HE GO LIVE THERE" would be more apt. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
"hahahaha sorry saddam hahahaha" That video is funny. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
A Foreign Policy, Falling Apart By Robert G. Kaiser We have come to a delicate moment in an absorbing drama. The actors seem unsure of their roles. The audience is becoming restless with the confusion on stage. But the scriptwriters keep trying to convince the crowd that the ending they imagined can still, somehow, come to pass.The authors stick to their plotline even as its plausibility melts away, and why not? For months the audience kept applauding; many of the reviewers were admiring, while many others kept still.No more. Senior military officers, government officials, diplomats and others working in Iraq, commentators, experts and analysts have all joined a chorus of doubters that is large and growing. And the applause -- in this case, public approval as measured in polls -- is fading.Already, some of the authors' friends are grabbing them by their rhetorical lapels. "Failures are multiplying," wrote George Will, the conservative columnist, yet "no one seems accountable."The original script included parts for American soldiers and diplomats, Iraqis, Arabs and Europeans, but many declined to play along or refused to perform as directed. No matter -- the authors promised to "stay the course." A quick look back at the list of promises made and then abandoned demonstrates how little the play now conforms to the original scenario. And by the way, just what is that "course" we are staying on?Americans are hopeless romantics -- we're always looking for the triumph of the good guys and happiness ever after. But any happy endings in Iraq remain so remote that they are invisible from here. Today no one seems able to come up with a realistic definition of what "success" might be. Instead the Bush administration has entrusted the future of the entire enterprise to an Algerian diplomat named Lakhdar Brahimi, whom we expect to assemble an Iraqi government in the next week or two -- an Algerian magic trick. Many in the new chorus of doubters have enumerated the ways |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
in which the success promised by the Bush administration both before and after the war has eluded us. We have not made a "a crucial advance in the campaign against terror," the words President Bush used when he declared victory in "Operation Iraqi Freedom" on May 1, 2003. Instead we have stimulated new hatred of the United States in precisely the regions from which future terrorist threats are most likely to arise, while alienating our traditional allies. By embracing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza, we abandoned the "honest broker" role that U.S. governments tried to play for four decades in the Middle East, and we confirmed the conspiratorial suspicions of every anti-American Arab. Our credibility has been battered.We set out to put fear into the hearts of our enemies by demonstrating the efficacy of a new doctrine of preemptive war. Instead, we have shown the timeless nature of hubris. Last week we announced the transfer of 3,600 troops of the overstrained U.S. Army away from the border of what might be the world's most dangerous country, North Korea. They will be sent to help with the war in Iraq, for which we now acknowledge we had inadequate resources.Contrary to the Bush administration's stated and implied promises -- "we will be greeted as liberators" was the vice president's famous version -- we did not achieve a relatively low-cost triumph in Iraq. Instead we have a crisis of still-growing dimensions. Our occupation policy has changed as often as the color of Madonna's hair. Ominously, as became clear with last week's assassination of Iraqi Governing Council president Izzedin Salim, we cannot even protect the Iraqis who have agreed to work with us.The war has damaged the good name of the United States in every corner of the globe, has cost unanticipated scores of billions (all of it borrowed) and now threatens long-term damage to our Army and National Guard. War has already disfigured the 3,500 American families whose sons and da |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
daughters have been killed or seriously wounded in Iraq, and countless Iraqi families as well. The United States gets itself into this kind of trouble when it turns away from that most fundamental of American values, pragmatism. The Bush administration's initial reaction to the first attacks on U.S. soil since the War of 1812 was highly pragmatic. It identified the source of the attack and went after it forcefully, with the country's and the world's enthusiastic support.But even before the war in Afghanistan was won, pragmatism yielded to ideology, and Bush asked the Pentagon to prepare for "preemptive" war against Iraq. There was no traditional casus belli, no classical justification for war.The war in Iraq was justified with two arguments that now appear dubious at best. The first was the idea that Iraq was an appropriate and important target in the new war against terror, when the United States had no evidence tying Saddam Hussein to any recent terrorism apart from the rewards he paid to the families of suicide bombers in Israel and other Palestinian "martyrs." The second was that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction threatened the United States, its allies and the entire Middle East region, but of course, those weapons have never been found.It will take years to sort out all that went wrong in Iraq, but in a general way, an explanation is already available. The Bush administration was on notice months before 9/11 about the risks and requirements of deploying our forces for military action abroad, and it defied the warnings. They were contained in a most pragmatic memorandum from Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld to President Bush. Rumsfeld wrote the memo in March 2001, at the very beginning of the new administration. Bob Woodward's 2002 book, "Bush At War," quotes briefly from it. The entire document, which Woodward provided, is haunting reading. Excerpts:. "In fashioning a clear statement of the underpinning for the action, avoid arguments of convenience. They c |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
They can be useful at the outset to gain support, but they will be deadly later." . "There should be clear, well-considered and well-understood goals as to the purpose of the engagement and what would constitute success . . ." . "The military capabilities needed to achieve the agreed goals must be available . . . " . "Before committing to an engagement, consider the implications of the decision for the U.S. in other parts of the world . . . . Think through the precedent that a proposed action, or inaction, would establish." . "Finally -- honesty: U.S. leadership must be brutally honest with itself, the Congress, the public and coalition partners. Do not make the effort sound even marginally easier or less costly than it could become. Preserving U.S. credibility requires that we promise less, or no more, than we are sure we can deliver. It is a great deal easier to get into something than to get out of it!"In other words, Rumsfeld laid out the standards for a serious, pragmatic strategy. The only obviously missing element in his memo was a recognition that military actions inevitably have political components that also require careful planning and shrewd execution.But when it came time to wage war against Iraq, Rumsfeld ignored his own guidelines. He developed no real strategy for what to do after ousting Saddam Hussein. As James Fallows has reported in the Atlantic Monthly, Rumsfeld actually banned Defense Department officials from participating in CIA- and State Department-led meetings on postwar Iraq. When those meetings produced extensive recommendations, which included warnings about nearly every pitfall we have since fallen into, the Pentagon simply ignored them. We went to war with no political plan for ending it. As George Will and others have argued, administration policy has been "neoconservative," rather than hard-headed and just plain conservative. A neoconservative believes that certain things must happen, Will wrote, whereas rational conservat |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
conservatives would only say that those things can happen. In his recent column on these subjects, Will pleaded for more reliance on empirical evidence -- in other words, on pragmatism: "This administration needs a dose of conservatism without the prefix." One prominent member of the empirical school on Iraq is retired Marine Gen. Anthony C. Zinni. From 1997 to 2000, Zinni was the commander in chief of U.S. Central Command, the job held by Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks in the recent war, and by Army Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Early in this administration, Zinni was Bush's envoy for the Middle East peace process. As a consultant to the CIA, he retained his access to top secret intelligence until shortly before the Iraq war began.For reasons he feels have been confirmed by events over the last 14 months, Zinni opposed the war in Iraq. He said the United States was successfully containing Saddam Hussein. Speaking to the Center for Defense Information on May 14, Zinni laid out America's "" in Iraq. Four are particularly noteworthy: . "The strategy was flawed. I couldn't believe what I was hearing about the benefits of this strategic move -- that the road to Jerusalem [i.e., to an Israeli-Palestinian peace] led through Baghdad, when just the opposite is true . . . [Or] the idea that we will walk in and be met with open arms . . . The idea that strategically we will reform, reshape and change the Middle East by this action -- we've changed it all right! All those that believed this [war] was going to be the catalyst for some kind of positive change . . . didn't understand the region, the culture, the situation and the issues." . "We had to create a false rationale for going in to get public support. . . . The books were cooked, in my mind. The intelligence was not there . . . . The rationale that we faced an imminent threat, or a serious threat, wa |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
was ridiculous." . "We underestimated the task. And I think those of us that knew that region, former commanders in chief . . . beginning with General Schwarzkopf, have said you don't understand what you're getting into [in Iraq] . . . . I can't understand why there was an underestimation when you look at a country that has never known democracy, that has been in the condition it's been in, that has the natural fault lines that it has, and the issues it has. And to look at the task of reconstructing this country, not only reconstructing it, but the idea of creating Jeffersonian democracy almost overnight, is almost ridiculous, in concept . . .". "We failed . . . to internationalize the effort." The first President Bush, Zinni said, set an admirable standard by insisting on a U.N. resolution and a broad international coalition before launching war against Iraq in Kuwait in 1991. "Why would we believe that we would not get [similar international support] this time?. . . . And what was the rush to war?"Last week, the administration remained bogged down in its Iraq swamp, not yet ready -- as it surely will have to be in the days or weeks ahead -- to confront what threatens to be a terminal crisis for George W. Bush. Tinkering won't fix the problem; the administration is going to have to alter its course. This may require embracing the pragmatism that has often saved us from our worst mistakes in the past.The events of the last few weeks recall the trauma of February and March in 1968, when Americans were absorbing the impact of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. Tet was a brilliant military campaign that won no lasting military benefit for the Vietnamese communists who executed it, but which humiliated an ignorant, over-confident America and destroyed political support for the war in the United States.Dean Acheson and Clark Clifford, two principal architects of "containment" -- the basis of American foreign policy toward Soviet and Chinese communists from Truman to Johnson and beyond -- |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
told their friend and president, Lyndon B. Johnson, that the jig was up. The costs of war in Vietnam were too high to justify its continuation.Soon afterward Johnson announced he would not seek reelection, and he asked the Vietnamese communists to negotiate peace. Exploiting antiwar sentiment, Richard M. Nixon won the presidency in 1968. His vanity and that of his principal aide, Henry A. Kissinger, prevented an early end to the war. They insisted on a "decent interval" before acknowledging defeat in Vietnam. It took seven more years, and tens of thousands of American and Vietnamese lives, to bring the war to an end.Acheson, Clifford and Johnson -- and ultimately, Nixon and Kissinger -- accepted the idea that losing Vietnam would not be a disaster. In retrospect, we can say they were right. Today we cannot know the consequences of any of the choices we may make in Iraq. We can only hope that the end won't be so long in coming this time.Author's e-mail:Robert Kaiser is associate editor and senior correspondent of The Post. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
now is what I like to see.. . an american with a brain.. . and this guy was involved in the military and is a self professed "gun nut".. . yet he has not let the wool be pulled over his eyes.. . have a read.. . its obvious he knows a lot more about this situation than any of us "kiddies". .. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
by falling off his bike. hahahaha |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
Oopsie, just as he'd mastered the dangerous art of eating savoury snacks without endangering one's own life. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
thats not true.... a common misconception, no doubt fuelled by the medias incredible bias, and the lefts conspicuous singling-out of israel in human rights criticism, and the tons of resolutions against israel pushed through the UN by arab states allied against israel (mentioning israel as the only racist state? incredible.... i dotn remember the name of the conference but im sure someone here knows it) anyways not that i support israels actions, but i want to try to even out the extremely one-sided popular discussion anyways about your "vis versa" thing zues, far more palestinians want israel to not exist than vis versa last statistics i heard (at least a year old) said something like 3/4 of israelis dont favour the occupation and think palestinians shoudl have an independant state and a smaller majority (i think it was about 60%, dont remember except that it WAS a majority) of palestinians want israel to NOT EXIST palestinian textbooks dont show israel on the map and dont mention it.... those are made, or comissioned anyway, by the same government that has signed agreements to eliminate hateful bias in its education israel is a modern democracy there is intense, constant debate in israel on the issues of occupation, terrorism, peace etc not all israelis are for crushing palestine and shooting little pali girls on their way to buy candy a minority of hardcore nationalists can hold a lot of sway, especially in a political system with like a billion little parties in the legislature and coalition governments, and especially when the people they want to keep opressed keep blowing up your kids i dont support israels actions but im fucking sick israel being portrayed as the soley responsible aggressor in the soooooo obviously extremely slanted media coverage and discussion especially in the left wing and im a left wing liberal and it pisses me off |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
thats not true, at least what youre implying isn't last statistics i heard (at least a year old) said something like 3/4 of israelis oppose teh occupation and want an independant palestine something like 60% (i just remember it was a low majority, but definitely a majority) of palestinians want israel to not exist. thats a big difference israel is a modern democracy, there is constant intense debate on the issue and most dont like whats going on but you would'nt know that given the incredibly biased media coverage and discussion, especially in the left (which pisses me off cus thats where i am) i haven't hread the whole thread, but are people actually saying that the media overall is biased in favour of israel? and about the resolutions.... the UN isn't some voice of the united spirit of noble humanity thats up in the sky passing judgement on us.... it does what its members do and only what its members do (ie want to do and wont oppose).... at least in terms of resolutions and that sort of thing teh resolutions passed against israel are pushed through by arab states allied against israel (labeling israel as the only racist state? cmon... theres no way that can be called a sober fair judgment/statement... i dont remember the name of the conference but im sure ppl here know it) whos allied against iraq? nobody.... nobody hates iraq the countries immediately around it are in some security risk, but thats it, and they have had the protection of the US (either directly, or by the US's posture on iraq), and no motivation to hate iraq(is) (uh, eg. they dont want to drive the iraqi pig infediles into the sea.... they dotn have a record of wanting to destroy iraq and its people....) the number of resolutions against one country or another is pretty meaningless all it says is how much other countries want to pass resolutions against this one, and how much still other countries want to block such resolutions or not, which cant be used to say much, especially w/ the complications of intl diploma |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
shit, sorry it didn't look like it posted the first time i refreshed and everything.... |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
btw, they want to |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
"i dont support israels actions but im fucking sick israel being portrayed as the soley responsible aggressor in the soooooo obviously extremely slanted media coverage" well, I don't know about canada, but all the news sources in american seem to paint palistine as the sole evil side of this war. The points I brought up against israel was merely to disprove someones arguement that 15 broken resolutions justify a war in iraq. "i haven't hread the whole thread," before I continue responding, why dont you read the entire thread first, so you know where Im coming from. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
Whats with this bombing of a wedding celebration? They even waited till everyone was asleep, killed 10 children too. How mistakes like this can happen with the technology they have i don't know. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
i've seen that Apache helicopter video he's talking about. What the fuck is wrong with these people, the army giving them some kind of new drug to not care about human life? One was wounded, but they still HAD to kill him, they act as if its some kind of computer game. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
i'd say it was either a misguided bomb, or it was bad intelligence (someone we trusted said a baddie was there), or we thought it was a bunch of baddies all together at a wedding party. with the number of bombs that are dropped it's not hard to believe we'd fuck up occasionally. war is hell, and we're carrying on a war in the middle of populated cities. i'm not saying it's not horrible, because it definately is. but, it's not unfathomable that accidents would happen. quite the contrary, it would be unfathomable to think that they wouldn't. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
they're not acting as if it were a game. if you're talking about the same video i've seen, the pilots are having an ongoing conversation with their commander about whether or not to fire on the men. they are trained to recognise weapons such as shoulder fired missiles. these missles are only used to kill people such as those pilots. in a war you kill the other guy before he kills you. it's not pretty, it's hardcore and violent, but if you don't want to die often times you have to kill people. as far as i know that video didn't even stir up any controversy because the pilots acted professionally, and did exactly what they were supposed to. was it pretty? absolutely not. that's war. it's shit. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
Wtf, Post LINKS NOT ENTIRE DAMN ARTICLES. jeezous, zeus. thx. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
yeah its that video, it just seems like they have no emotion whatsoever, no fear, no nothing. The people in the video didn't even look like they had weapons, just walking about by a truck and a tractor. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
to be a soldier you've got to take the emotion out of it. i mean if killing people is what you have to do for a year or so, you pretty much have to turn things off or you'll burn out and go crazy. that's probably why they sometimes have trouble adjusting back to normal life when things are over. i know the army provides all kinds of psychological help for soldiers when they get back. lots of times mariages don't last because people get really detatched. and yeah, they did have a weapon. the guy in the trucks have a shoulder fired rocket that they carry over to the guy on the tractor. it was probably a late night sale or something. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
your probably right, but i still think the wounded one shouldn't have been killed. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
I remember Elusive posted that video, and I had sort of the same reaction. It is sort of chilling, the way they calmy end those lives. But that's war. They were not doing this for fun, and they didn't enjoy it. And there's no sense shedding a tear for a guy who would gladly shoot you out of the sky. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
i'd really like to see non-lethal weaponry become good enough to use more. it really sucks bad that a lot of the initial iraqi army probably didn't even want to fight us but they had no choice. that really really sucks. seems like we could just squirt that glue stuff all over them and hold them captive until saddam was booted then let them go back home. but the people who are fighting us now seem to be pretty set on killing us. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
While I'm not crazy about the ''Baby Blaster'' that causes instant deafness, it would be nice if they perfected the infamous ''Brown Note''. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
sorry, it was emailed to me, and so I didnt have a link jesus, elusive. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
no, i understood that that was your point, i read that part of the thread and thats why i responded to it i know theres also a lot of anti-palestinian bias out there too, but in my experience the left wing is predominently anti-israel here in toronto the leftish newspapers (Toronto Star is a great example) are really clearly anti israel pro palestine the Toronto Star has the highest circulation of any canadian newspaper (its not just in toronto), so its not an extreme example.... it has an incredibly blatant anti-israel, pro-palestine slant in the big majority of the coverage on that conflict lots of sensational, dramatic articles, and ommiting relevant information and including irrelevant informatin that makes the palestinians side easier to adopt it also happens to have a really anti-american bias, surprise surpise smaller local toronto papers are even worse the CBC (canadian BBC) too, which moderately left, and the BBC even more so (israels government has threatened to stop dealing with the BBC b/c of their 'unfair coverage') most of the left wing news websites i see feature an anti-israel, pro-palestine slant, as does the discussion in liberal discussion forums, and among liberal left wing people i know, young and old educators (most are pretty liberal in my experience) have been similarly anti israel in my experience in both highschool and university in fact i cant remember ever discussing the issue in class with a teacher who had the opposite bias yeah yeah "everyone has bias", its true that doesn't mean its not important to identify it and theres a big difference between open bias and the kind that is subtley, often intentionally, meant to persuade your audience without their realizing it....... in that case they adopt opinions that aren't based on open reasonable arguments thats the kind of bias im talking about but in general, canada tends to be more leftwing liberal than the US, particularly in mass media |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
word. but I just want to make clear, I dont favor one more then the other. the whole situation is fucked, and a complete mess, and basically everyone is to blame. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
pantalaimon , "yeah its that video, it just seems like they have no emotion whatsoever, no fear, no nothing. The people in the video didn't even look like they had weapons, just walking about by a truck and a tractor. " you obvisouly missed the first 2minutes of that video tha weren't released right away. there WAS a sam, complete with the saftey "flag"....etc, and he took it, ran out in the field, and tossed it out for later pickup |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
Zeus, Sorry, but again.....it's an email ::looks at the first post of this thread:: j/k please don't argue this post, lol :) |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
sorry. if you dont want a response, dont say anything! his email was a list of "facts" by some random guy putting out an email, that seems debatable. my articale was an editorial opinion. not stating it as fact. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
yes they're "facts". you make it seem like its a bad thing that all these improvements are occuring in iraq, but i'm sure you wouldn't know or care about it cause you'll be too busy running away from the draft. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
just in case you missed it from the other thread: "im so sick of you. im no longer discussing these issues with you because either a. you are completely retarded, and its a waste of my time, or b. you are just being a dick, trying to cause arguements. I really hope its b, because I find it hard that there is someone so stupid as you." |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
zues look i'll post a new topic in appreciation of your genius |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
zeus, ............ :'( |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
elusive, ............. :'( |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
|
Messageboard index
|
|||||||||
