Monday, February 11, 2008

Iranian History Lesson

Info for my good friend HP.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't understand how people can't understand why we would get blow back. "You smack my back, I'll smack yours". Pretty simple.

Jon said...

It's all just radical Islamic extremism, man. It's that they are just jealous of our prosperity and freedom. I'm embarassed to say I once bought into that crap.

HispanicPundit said...

...and here, here and here and especially here is something for you.

As I said to you before, it is easy to throw mud...far harder it is to stand on firm ground and support an actual policy.

Elizabeth said...

You loser, too bad the link didn't go anywhere!! HA!

Jon said...

You're not making sense, HP. It's hard to support an actual policy? What does that mean? I support an actual policy. Stop starving kids, overthrowing democratically elected leaders for oil profits, etc.

Jon said...

Libby, how dare you speak to me that way.

HispanicPundit said...

In other words, decisions were not made in a vacuum. Alot of times you have to take evil A if it is less than evil B. To speak only of the 'evil of A' without recognizing evil B is disingenuous at best.

I'm not saying I disagree with any of the facts presented, I'm just pointing out that foreign policy is generally more than mere 'Stop starving kids, overthrowing democratically elected leaders for oil profits'.

It's a bit more complicated than that...

Jon said...

Well, you know I agree with you that it's about alternatives. But it seems to me that no matter what we do you can run for cover under the excuse "Well, it's hard to know if any of the other options would have made everyone better off, because we can't redo the past."

That's an excuse that justifies every action. What I think you need to do is list the alternatives and explain why you think the path we chose (baby starving and overthrowing democratically elected leaders) was the right one based upon what we knew at the time.

Also, a blanket "things are complicated" is also a cop out. You can say that about anything. With this mindset you'll never consider whether we've ever done something wrong.

We knew the rate that kids were starving, so that was a given. What are the options? Keep on with it. That's what we did. For 12 years or so. It wasn't doing any good and we could see that.

We also had weapons inspectors in there. They left in 1998 because we wanted to bomb them some more, not because Saddam kicked them out. So getting them back in was feasible, and we did it in 2002. That sounds like a good option. Remove sanctions, provide full inspections, and away you go. Isn't that better?

Second, we installed him, so putting myself in the shoes of a person in 1996 that knew kids were starving and knew it was doing nothing to get him out, I know that I can't continue to punish the people of Iraq for my mistake. We could even consider pulling sanctions and not even bothering with inspections. It's not our problem. If he's a threat to anyone it would be Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Iran. Let them deal with it. If they want to bring pressure and force inspections let them.

Trying to be as far as possible and not using 20/20 hindsight, I'm saying based upon what we knew at the time, what we did was wrong. Grossly wrong.