War in Iraq

Thank you for taking my debate. Your macho perspective is quite invigorating, and I would be disappointed if my opponent didn't show as much... entusiasm... I respect the fact that you are not going to rely on statistics, as neither am I. Statistics are heavily abused, taken out of context, and manipulated by the user to the point that they are often more of a hamper to the debate process than a tool. We will have a very good ideological debate without them. I personally believe that we don't look weak and pathetic. Like I said, our army is bigger and more powerful than the rest of the world's armies combined. If all two hundred or so countries in the world waged war on us simultaneously, we probably wouldn't lose a single standard planes-and-bombs battle, and we could nuke every one of them back to hell for even thinking about it. I believe that flexxing our muscles, in the way that we are doing right now in Iraq, only makes us look tyrannical to the rest of the world. Al qaeda isn't stupid; they probably provoked us into going over there just to make us look worse than we are. We were doing a good job up until this conflict in the middle east and that small faction of western-hating racists probably engineered this situation exactly the way it is. The world hates us, anti-western sentiment is at an all time high, our own citizens hate their government, and the Al-Qaeda have created the precise scenario that is ideal for their ideologies to take hold in the middle-east. Now a Democrat is about to take the white house and pull us out of Iraq, and I shudder to think what is going to happen next. Your noble intentions to join the military and fight notwithstanding, warriors are not, for very good reason, the ones who make the decision to go to war. Our constitution clearly says that "two thirds of congress" must vote for us to engage in a war like this. These congresspeople are not warriors, they are diplomats and politicians, and only they have the sound mind to legitimately lead us into war. Now I'm sure that you all know that congress has not authorized this war. There is a DAMN good reason for the founders setting up our government in the way they did, and somehow our president has bypassed the constitution and taken us in anyway. Bush continues to mock the constitution, and he deserves to be impeached for his actions (however that is another subject). When I say "use the pity" I am talking about virtue. Humility is a virtue, and one we fail to employ effectively. After 9/11, Bush should have traveled to the middle-east as a diplomat and spoken out against the attacks. We could have conducted pinpoint operations, tartgeting ONLY terrorists, instead of invading countries the way we did. Iraq was not a terrorist sponsoring country. Saddam Hussein had nothing at all to gain from terrorism. Think about it. He had his own country to deal with. The very nature of terrorism is very counterproductive to the leader of a nation, isn't it? What did Saddam have to gain with all this? Are you telling me that a guy who is savvy enough to take over a country and hold it for 30 years is stupid enough to send terrorists to America just to have his country taken away and have himself hanged by the neck? Did he forget that ten years before we had invaded his country and rolled right over every defense he had? This is proposterous. We played right in to Al-Qaeda's hands. We should have sent our president into the middle east in the wake of the attacks, so he could have gathered support for our cause and we could have dismantled Al-Qaeda slowly and surely, using diplomatic and monetary pressure choke them out. If we gave one tenth of the money we spent on the war to help the peoples of those nations smoke out Bin Laden, we would be 90% richer right now and Bin Laden would be lying in a ditch. Sure, Hussein would still be running his country, but I think his country was better off with him than without him anyway. You will see that the next leader of Iraq will be a complete monster, and sure, you will blame it on the liberals for pulling us out "too early" (McCain wants to stay there for another 50 to 100 years), but you militaristic conservatives have to realize that you don't own our country. You don't get to use our military freely for an unlimited amount of time to do whatever you please with. Just because you are more militaristic, doesn't mean you have free-reign with our military. No incidents since 9/11? Of course there haven't been. We stepped up our security in airports, so it won't happen again. That has nothing to do with the war. There wasn't much going on in the way of terrorism BEFORE 9/11 either, but you don't want to talk about that, do you? All you care about is what happened afterward, and you act like the soldiers in Iraq are the only thing standing between us and them. 9/11 was an isolated incident and it was specifically designed to make us look like tyrranical monsters, and it worked quite well. Iraq's nuke program is irrelevent. Everyone will have nukes eventually, and trying to hold every country back from developing them will be like holding back a stream with your bare hands. We will need more intelligent reasoning to guide us through the next century than "lets invade and destroy every nuke producing country". You are saying that Iraq is better off with us there, but I don't see that. We are holding them in limbo right now, and nothing good will happen until we leave and let them have their civil war. Sunnis and Shiites are going to have it out and they need to. What if Al-Qaeda came into the U.S. during our civil war and prevented us from fighting and told us that we are just going to have to get along and by the way we are going to be changing to THEIR system of government while we are at it. I'm sure a guy like you can empathize with that, at least. Kids playing in parks is not representative of us doing well in Iraq. The kids would play in exploded tanks if that was all they had to work with. Go ask those kids if they want you to go home and see what they tell you. You say to leave the subject of war to warriors, but that is exactly what Al-Qaeda wants. They can play you hot-headed guys like a deck of cards. It takes an intelligent leader to weave through the deception and make the right decisions. The founders set our government up this way for a reason and Bush was able to use the confusion after 9/11 to abuse it and we haven't been able to stop him yet. But come this November, I think it is clear we are going to have a very big change of plans. Pack up your bags, soldier boy, your coming home whether you want to or not.