Liberation

Here, for those of you who are still skeptical, take a look.

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/obs/20766.htm

Isn't that worth it?

 

That's all government propaganda as far as I am concerned. Why do you believe everything you read, especially coming from the government itself? The fact of the matter is that people are still dying for nothing. Of course they're going to try and make everything look good if it means them furthering their own sinister cause. Wake the fuck up!

 

Have fun thinking that.

 

give me a break. it's too frustrating to even try to reason w/these types. I'm so sick of hearing about 9/11, how many years ago did that happen?? and you still hear about it every day, just because it happened to Americans. So tiring. And what does this have to do w/Iraq?

 

Yes... 5 smiling children make up for the 500 dead bodies in the streets

 

Yes everything you disagree with is propaganda. I hate to tell you but thats not a valid argument. These clips don't change the fact that war is terrible, but they do demonstrate that there are good things happening because of what we did.

Or look at it this way: why do you believe everything you read that says Bush lied? Leftists who hate him are just as capable of spreading propaganda. Especially when the media thinks it can make money off of a new scandal.

See my sig.

 

Perhaps sometimes we are too prone to labeling something as propaganda or a conspiracy, but come on... that's the government's own website, so I can't help but be skeptical. That's like trying to douse drug war skepticism by presenting us with a "DARE" webpage as a reputable authority.

 

Ok, point taken, but those videos were actually taken in the actual places they advertise. Yes the government wants you to agree with it, but believe it or not, sometimes they tell the truth. There has been the strange phenomenon that started during Vietnam that says that everything the government tells you is a lie. Think it through and do a little research and you will find that that is just not true.

As much as we bitch and moan about the corruption and stupidity of elected officials (i'm guilty of it too), sometimes they actually do try to serve the people.

 

I have a question. How do you liberate a group of people who do not want to be liberated? Even prior to the prison abuse scandals, the resentment of the Iraqi people towards the us military was huge. ask any of the soldiers over there and they'll tell you that. Sure Saddam needed to go, but I still think it could have happened had diplomacy been explored further.

So what are the answers? Do you honestly think we can root out all of the radical extremists especially when our actions are creating more of them? I just don't see this thing coming to an end.

 

First of all, I'd say the vast majority wanted to be liberated. You remember all the pictures of people rejoicing in the streets.

Yes, some of the people do resent our presence. that is inevitable. And trust me, as soon as the Iraqis have a government and military that can take care of itself, we will leave. But it takes time. I also think (though I dont have all the facts) that a large part of the problem is power grabs by religious leaders. They think they can become the ruler of a new Iraq if they rally the people to themselves and turn them against the US.

In the context of history, things are moving extraordinarily fast. It took over ten years for west Germany to have a stable government and economy.

No. There will always be extremists, even after we leave. There were Nazi extremists long after Germany was defeated. There are Russian communist extremists today. But when the majority of the people see how beneficial the changes are, I think those extremists will become outcasts just as neonazis are today.

Again, it takes time. too many Americans expect everything to be resolved in half an hour like a sitcom. We're dealing with the real world here, and the reality is changes take time.

 

Yeah there will be people after we leave the land we liberated... Like Korea right?

 

Sorry, but the Koreans WANT us there. We're not there in some imperialistic crusade. They wanted us to stay to help defend their country.
Likewise the Kuwaitis WANTED us to keep a permanent military base there. They are actually paying for a huge state of the art base with nobody's money but their own. All that and they still have the funds to send every 18 year old to college on grants and offer one million dollars to retirees.

 

Mainman -

You can't be serious in comparing the situation in Iraq to that of Germany following world war II. Nazi extremism represents such a small fraction of time in history compared to the situation in the middle east that has been going on for thousands of years. The hatred between different ethnic and religious groups will remain far after the US leaves. Remember we put Saddam in power, who's to say that the new Iraqi leadership won't do the same thing? I'm sorry, but to say that we are there to liberate the Iraqi people is BS. This war is about oil and scaring potential terrorists - nothing more.

If the US was that concerned with liberating and saving a nation then why didn't we have 130,000 troops in the Congo and Uganda to restore order over the last five years when 3 million people died? You bet your ass we would have been there had those countries had the same amount of oil reserves as Iraq.

 

Arabs have not hated the US for thousands of years. That only came about after 1948 when Israel was created (which is a whole other topic).

We can't guarantee that whoever becomes Iraq's leader won't end up being just as bad. I can't see into the future and neither could anyone when Saddam rose to power. Also remember that we did not "put" him in power, we just didn't oppose it.

And you're right that this war is about scaring potential terrorists. You may remember that the war on terrorism started after sep. 11 to remove the terrorist threat. That means scaring the governments that support terrorsim so the terrorists themselves cant get the money to launch attacks. We told the world we would remove governments that sponsor terrorism and thats what we're doing. We cant scare them into complying unless we back it up. the ones that refused to change their policy are being eliminated. But thats yet another thing that doesnt happen overnight.

First off I dont know anything about those particular coflicts, but I can offer these theses:
1. When Clinton was president, the skirmishes that we got into for such situations were merely superficial, and did little or nothing to change the situation in those countries.
2. Bush was in office for less than a year when sep. 11 happened. So even if he was planning to do something (I'm not saying he was or wasnt, though admitedly I doubt he was), that kind of takes precedence.
3. The primary objective of the war on terror is to deal with direct threats to the US and its allies. Argue all you want as to whether Iraq was a direct threat, but considering we had troops in Kuwait and Turkey, and our ally, Israel is just around the corner, Iraq was certainly a bigger threat than Congo.

 

That's fine and well, but the topic here is LIBERATION - which the US government could give a shit about.

That term was thrown in there to cover our ass in the event that WMD were not found. Guess what they weren't found.

 

you sure are right...

 

And now we're doing both:
http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/breaking_1.html

 

Oh yeah, I forgot about that. The UN, did find WMD's

 

How can you doubt this? Do you do any research what so ever? Sept 11 only acted as a catalyst for american support of the war - Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz planned the whole thing in 1997 - this is a FACT.

 

Well here is some info about The World Tribune

http://newyorker.com/talk/content/?030908ta_talk_mcgrath

"In fact, the World Tribune is not published in the United Kingdom, nor is it, to be precise, a newspaper. It is a Web site produced, more or less as a hobby, in Falls Church, Virginia, and is dedicated to the notion, as its mission statement explains, that “there is a market for news of the world and not just news of the weird.” (Nonetheless, the site includes a prominent feature, Cosmic Tribune, with an extraterrestrial focus, and it links to a Mafia journal called Gang Land News.)"

I don't consider it a very good news source. The site also wanted to install spyware on my computer...what reputable news site does that?