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(Doug Miller) wrote in
m:

In article .com,
"Charlie Self" wrote:
Doug Miller states:

On my planet, Saddam is still a murderous tyrant. Has that notion
been
debunked on yours?

Nobody has even suggested Saddam Hussein was less than a murderous
tyrant. What others, and I, feel is that he was not a direct threat to
the U.S. at any time, not likely to become one in a rational time
frame, and thus was not worth the expenditure of life and treasure
that has been applied.

Oh, yes, someone has suggested that, at least implicitly: Nate, in his
response to me, finally acknowledged that there might have been
reasons other than WMDs for invading Iraq, and implied that they've
been debunked too.

Not all of them.

Not on my planet, anyway.

Maybe on Nate's.

Absolutely wrong, Doug. I never ever said that Saddam was less than a
murderous tyrant.

What I said was that Iraq had no WMDs and no ties to Al Qaeda, and
therefore the primary stated reasons for war have been debunked. You
appear to want to deny the reality that the administration *did* use
WMDs and terror ties as the primary justification for preemptive war.
And you appear to believe the fiction that it was never primarily about
WMDs; that instead it was about something in paragraph 42 of the
Cincinatti speech.

You consistently want to try to divert the argument into a question of
absolutes that might be easier for your point to argue. In fact few
things in life are black and white absolutes. The question is whether a
reasonable person, knowing what we know now, would find a compelling
reason to engage in a war that's costing us hundreds of billions and
thousands of lives. For me, there is not.

Spreading freedom and democracy. Yeah, right. Take a look at how
influential Al Sistani has become in Iraqi politics. Do you think he
sports a fundamentalist Islamic beard and a turban because he's going to
advocate Western-style democracy?

Dislodging dictators. Yeah, right. We don't have enough troops or
money to go after every bad dictator in the world. And the reality is
that we don't. We cozy up to bad apples like Musharraf (who really is a
dictator exporting WMD technology), and we ignore genocidal tragedies
like those in Darfour.

Do you really believe this is about a consistent and effective foreign
policy?

"Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong,
which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be
a man." --Mark Twain