War on Terror

If the administration is being grief, from either foreign or domestic entities, I can't say I feel very much sympathy. The president decided on a unilateral course of action against the stated wishes of almost every other country in the world (as represented in the UN), including a few allies, as well as many people within this country. He cannot have expected anything but animosity to have arisen from such blatant disregard for their opinions. The decision was made and now the inevitable consequences are being dealt out. The first link you provided led me to a snopes site - to which I will give credit for credibility - but it merely listed quotes from Democrats saying that they also thought there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I remind you that I am not here to advocate on behalf of the Democratic party; though my beliefs generally align with their stated causes I cannot actually support them due to my general low of opinion of politicians across the board, though I suppose I might think minutely better of one who at least pretends to believe in something good. The point I am getting at is that I really don't care if every politician in the country attacked Iraq for having weapons; politicians' words don't convince me. It may have been trendy at the time, before this war took so many lives, to denounce Hussein, and so until and unless some actual proof of a weapons program is produced I will remain unconvinced. Which is far from to say that I think it unlikely that there were such weapons - on the contrary, I think it very likely; but "very likely" is just not good enough, in my book, to go to war. We have stirred up extensive turmoil that will not subside for years and probably decades, and will probably only be quelled with the ascension of another dictator to power. We can't just reach into another country, destroy the system that was in place - no matter how corrupted and harmful it might have been - and expect that life will go on for the citizens of that nation without major mishap. It was short-sighted, hasty, and entirely out of line. Your other two links gave me error messages when I tried to view them. Regarding torture: it is not its potential deadliness that I have a problem with - I accept that very few people actually die from torture. But I do consider waterboarding to be torture, because though it leaves no scars on the body, it causes an intense state of mental distress that is nothing to be sneered at. Degradation is also a form of torture. Any human being has a right to basic dignity, and to strip them of that is to lower them to the state of dogs or machines, something lacking sentience. When the Nazis wanted to break people in their concentration camps, they took away their names, branded them with numbers, and treated them like cattle. Holocaust survivors have described the effects of the process they underwent to make them feel inhuman and there is no denying that such acts as, for example, stripping a prisoner of his clothes and forcing him to remain in an uncomfortable and submissive position for hours on end has sever psychological effects. All I can say is that the rest of your counterargument really kind of states my point for me. As you've acknowledged, I am not pro-terrorist or pro-Al Qaeda or anything of the sort. I would denounce what they are doing as loudly as I do the actions of the Bush administration if I thought it would do any good. But for you to feel the need to compare our actions to such repressive and inhuman organizations really shows how low our practices have sunk, that they need to be set beside those of (legitimate) terrorists to put them in an acceptable light. We need hardly be congratulated on having practices above those of Al Qaeda - it's expected. If a child walks up to an adult and slaps his kneecap, and the adult refrains from kicking the child, you're not going to see a whole lot of people running over to say, That was well-done. We are supposed to be, we claim to be, pioneers of human and civil rights; yet how can we claim such an honor when we strip prisoners - and I will restate that they are often arrested and held without any charges being brought against them, a point which you have neglected to respond to - of any human dignity, and deliberately cause physical discomfort and psychological torture? I might add that for all your comparisons to Al Qaeda, in which we come out the better, comparisons have also been made to Soviet torture tactics, and we have been found to be on very much the same page as they were. The articles I posted last time state explore these points in greater detail but I will make them again nevertheless: many of our so-called "interrogation" techniques are taken from a training program for helping brace U.S. soldiers against torture they may face at the hands of immoral enemies, compiled during the Cold War using torture tactics known to be employed by the Soviet Union; and such techniques have proven, time and again, to produce words, not of honesty, but of whatever category and making whatever point the captive thinks his tormentors want to hear. Of course some of them have confessed to being members of a terrorist organization - they're being tortured and think that those magic words will make it end, will make sure they never have to face that drowning feeling again, or be left dripping in a cold cell to contract pneumonia, or whatever practice has been latest employed against them. As for the article you included at the end of your response: I fail to see how it and the evidence it presents really does all that much to support your argument. The use of poison gas on his own people, while tragic, can hardly be used as evidence that he intends to attack other nations - we hardly expect attack from China, and they are equally cruel to their dissident citizens, or from Sudan, whose president Omar Al-Bashir is engaged in his second genocide. I fail also to see the cognizant leap between the knowledge that such poison gas is being used and the assertion that we should bomb Iraq; if the people of that country are already suffering poison gas under the regime, do they need the added grief of having bombs dropped on their homes? And is a ruler so callous as to actively attack his own people actually going to care if bombs are dropped on their homes? I just don't understand the reasoning at all. I must confess myself also not entirely impressed with the use of a Post editorial to communicate a point regarding the Iraq war: firstly, because it's an editorial, and those are supposed to be very opinionated, one-sided and provocative - otherwise they won't sell; and secondly, because in this debate, at least, I am quarreling with the War on Terror and not so much the war in Iraq, a distinction I feel must be made to fully understand the points I am making. I apologize if any of that gave offense as I meant no disrespect; I simply didn't understand your choice of sources to support your argument and so responded only to those parts that I saw as relevant to my own arguments, but would welcome clarification if I somehow missed the point of what you were trying to say.