Governments must consider the moral implications of their actions when formulating foreign policy

By doing away with the opening statement, I mostly meant the formalities we'd been putting at the top. I accept his parameters for the kind of government we should look to as being valid. Contention A. My opponent attempts to defend his example of the United States policy of warning and then destroying unidentified aircraft as being an example of morality being used in our foreign policy. I'm a little confused as to why he asks me to cite a source here; I was responding to his example, not coming up with one of my own. But I will reiterate my response to this example. Our policy of protecting our airspace makes perfect logical sense. For reasons shown clearly in the 9/11 attacks, we have to watch our airspace closely. It also would not make any sense to shoot down planes without warning; that would lead to dead civilians and be harmful to US interests. Thus, this strategy employed by the American Military is the rational option, one that could be devised using reasoning completely devoid of morality. My opponent misconstrues my argument about why we invaded Iraq. I was not contending that we invaded Iraq because of 9/11, although the anger the American public felt made it an easier sell that the war would have been otherwise. Let me quote my original case: "For example, in Iraq, Saddam Hussein was a murderer and genocidal maniac. So under false pretenses we invaded his country, expecting to be treated as liberators. Instead, we became embroiled in a deadly quagmire that gave Al Qaeda resurgence and posed a genuine threat to our national security." That is the rationale I believe the Bush Administration was following when it went to war. My opponent then goes on to quote Osama Bin Laden, but misconstrues the original meaning of this line. Bin Laden is not an Afghan; he is in fact obscure Saudi Arabian royalty (a family that obviously no longer supports him). The country he was referring to was not Afghanistan as my opponent alleges but rather Saudi Arabia, who makes significant portions of its GDP from oil sales to the United States. Indeed, one of Bin Laden's founding principles in the creation of Al Qaeda was the removal of U.S. bases from Saudi Arabia. This quote has been taken out of context and does not really pertain to the round. But I think the basic point of my contention is being lost in the argument over specific examples. I contend that if we try to follow a moral code, it will lead to national security impacts of large proportions, because any time you take into account factors other than military capability and absolute necessity for national survival, you run the risk of over extending your military and being inefficient at achieving your goals. This is a problem the United States is suffering from now. Contention B. My opponent appears to contend that sanctions looking after the national interest killed 500,000 Iraqi children, and that if I support looking to the national interest first and foremost I have their blood on my hands. This is not the case. If you look at the timeline, we put sanctions (presumably the ones my opponent is referring to as it is the only time we have ever sanctioned Iraq) directly after the Persian Gulf War, in which the Iraqi military was crushed into oblivion by American and NATO forces. The affect this had on the Iraqi economy was profound. Combined with the fact that Saddam is a Genocidal maniac who took what supplies Iraq still had and kept them to himself. Thus there is no way to know how many deaths were actually caused by sanctions, but it is certainly less than the figure he just read to you. Sorry: silence is concession is a debate term that I did not explain thoroughly enough. I'll concede that you did not concede anything. "It was done for retaliation and for atomic security. (Whether or not those atomic reasons were justified have yet to be determined)" This is exactly the kind of thinking I would like to dispel. It was done for neither retaliation nor atomic security. It is quite clear today if you research the issue that Saddam Hussein, while a bad guy, had absolutely no connection to Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. There was nothing to retaliate for. And as my opponent pointed out earlier, if it was for retaliation, why attack in 2003? His second argument is equally false. I would like to first point out that it is now an absolute fact that Hussein DID NOT have nuclear weapons; we have had total control of that country for seven years now and have found absolutely no WMDs. The only question that remains is whether or not the Bush administration knew at the time that there would be no nukes. "On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam's inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again …. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy." A quote from Salon.com. My opponent cites the Truman Doctrine as proof we are the world police. I'd like to point out the conflicts that the Truman Doctrine has gotten us into: namely Vietnam and Korea. Thousands upon thousands of Americans dying in wars that we really have no stake in. Yes, we may be the world's police, but we certainly shouldn't be. He also includes a line that the government is but an agent of its members. Absent any polling information, I'm not sure how that applies. Contention C. Normally I would say why his argument about the government representing a collective is false, but I can't do that and still fit inside the 8,000 character limit. However, I don't need to. My original argument is simply that different views of morality causes conflicts we could otherwise avoid. This is still true even if a nation represents its people's morality. As I pointed out originally, the morality of the people of Saudi Arabia is vastly different from that of America. Morally, it is not out of the question that we may feel obligated to free their women from the persecution they endure; not being able to drive cars, wear clothing other than burkahs, etc. Obviously, any kind of tension with Saudi Arabia, who we depend on for the majority of our oil supply, would be against the national interest. The same is true of Countries in Africa, or Asia, or even Eastern European countries. Moral codes vary, and cultural differences have all too often lead to war. If we were to operate using simple logic instead of the biases associated with our culture, this problem would largely disappear. The claim that I referred to American citizens (or any humans for that matter) as property is blatantly untrue. The line I assume he gets that from is meant to be read as "harming American citizens AND destroying American property." I would not call humans property, that is obviously not acceptable. My opponent then said that we sided with the lesser of two evils when it came to Hitler and Stalin. This is not entirely true. We made peace with Stalin because we wanted to win WWII, and couldn't without his help. Now, the moral thing to do would be to turn down the help of a man as evil and murderous as Stalin, but that would have lost us the war. We made the practical decision, not the moral one. And our eventual opposition to Communism was in large part about protecting the human rights of Americans. That is what the whole Cold War was about. We didn't want to become a Russian satellite, and our citizens would lose all of the benefits that were associated with capitalism. The only time morality entered the equation, the way it seems to me, was in our decision to protect democracy in strategically unimportant areas, such as Korea and Vietnam. This turned out to be a mistake. Thus, the Cold War backs up by assertions. The Negative Rest