Karma,

I agree that we are a lot a like. It's kind of like how most Christian denominations are basically alike but differ to varying degrees on minor doctinal issues (which of course to them are huge differences but to outside observers they don't see much difference between, for instance, full emersion baptism and sprinkling water on the head baptism).



Well, I'd question you on China...but I get your overall point. Actually that's basically the one part of Kantian philosophy I like (to a certain degree), his foreign policy. Kant predicted that a "league of peace" would form among democratic nations in which there would not be a supra-national organization like the UN, but that democratic nations would become so friendly and interlinked with each other that war would become unthinkable. China can't be included because of its lack of democracy and war is still thinkable with China (that's why Japan, the US, and Austrailia have been forming an alliance with India). But anyways, I suppose that's another of our comparatively minor divergences.



There are three ways of convincing another nation to follow the course you want them to follow. Coercion (threats or punitive action), inducement (rewards or bribes), or persuasion (using logic to convince a nation that their actions are not in their best interests). With a person like Kim Jong Il, persuasion is doomed to failure. Coercion, either economic sanction or attacking NK, was ruled out by China (what I think we should have done was to tell China to deal with the problem or we'd screw over their trade with us, it would have temporarily hurt our economy and businesses that outsourced to China would have been hurt, but China would have been harmed worse as they are dependent on us for a market until they grow a large enough consumer class, but that was Bush's stupid policy). That left our only option as inducement. It worked but I do agree that inducement can be overused, and after a while too much inducement leads to perceived weakness, which leads more nations acting against the US.

Our economic ties political entanglement make war unlikely.


The chinese are boxed. Upon each boarder they have a nuclear power or a nation otherwise so powerful that invasion and expansion would be suicidal.


China has no practical option but peace. The chinese furthermore are reliable in their politics and don't choose courses that are radically against their interests.


NK and most other nations don't seem to heed these. ONe of the good things about the Iraq war is that made it clear that we might just invade if they don't shape up.


This rewards bad behavior more then anything. Most US "aid" is in fact a bribe to not act like dickholes.

When has that ever worked against a hostile people? I would have respect for the policy if it ever worked... ever.


Indeed... which leads one to the only sensible course.


NK as you've said should be made China's responsibility. Make it clear to them and the world that China created north korea in the first place and it's strategic level foreign policy is it's own' responsibility.


China won't bribe NK... they'll tell them to stop being morons iwth a big toothy grin.


emphases on the teeth. Had it not been for teh chinese NK never would have been. You'd just have Korea.

Not all bears attack people either...


But if a bear attacks a man and starts eatting him... does the reason effect what you have to do with the bear?


No matter the bear's reason you'll do the same thing to it.

YOu'll stop it... and then destroy it.


Afterwards you can ask "why"... not before.


Islam is an excuse for their power not for their suicides. They don't like to kill young men. That isn't their point. They use the young men as a means to an end which is power.


We all seek power... it's a human drive. You can supress it but by nature it's there in you and most people don't suppress it. Furthermore, it isn't even a good idea to supress it. Ambition is a powerful force for good when channeled properly.



Then why are almost all terrorsts middle to upper class?


These people are not bombing you because they're poor. Quite the opposite. They're bombing you becaues they're empowered.


Learn from history. Rebellions almost always happen when an oppressive power relaxes it's control.

imperialism and colonialism certainly shaped the modern middle east... but this insurgency is largely empowered by the retreat of imperialism and colonialism... not it's presence. When you pull out like that there's a power vacuum... and it gets filled.

I dont care who's philosophy it is, or whether you hate it or not.

You can't convince me killing people is right, in any circumstance. That is why the UN has war crimes, and almost all of them are basicly about the same thing, killing innocents is wrong, and I would extend that to say that killing anyone is wrong.

impractical and naive... sometimes you have to kill people. Furthermore, there is a distinction between killing someone in war and war crimes.


War crimes are for things like genocide. Something that neither the US nor any of it's close allies has been guilty of in over 100 years... with the obvious exception of Japan and Germany... though both of those countries have entirely different governments now and thus aren't really the same countries.

The countries are guilty. The world is guilty. We are letting genecide happen across the world. The Chinese are using people in dangerous experiments(and no doubt the US is too). Africa is riddled with warlords and war crimes the likes no one has ever seen. The entire world just sits idly while people in Darfur starve, die and lose their homes and family. And just right now over 200,000 people have died in a pointless war, innocents lost their lives just because the US wanted to prove to the world that it recovered from the Vietman fiasco, and guess what? It failed at that too.



That is a barbaric and outdated view.

hah, this is funny.


LOLZ


LOLZ


well, sufficit to say I dont think either of you is right.

which countries?

what does that even mean?

Are we really? What would you suggest we do about it? Invade half of africa? Would you support nation building half a continent?


Give me a flipping break.


We're damned by people like you if we go in and try to make things better and we're damned if we don't.


Thus your whole opinion is predetermined and independent of reality... and thus completely without worth. Much like a religious person's opinion on why God must exist... it's faith... not reason that sustains belief in God so pretending that it's some kind of logical conclusion is asinine. Likewise you seem to worship at the alter of hopelessness, conspiracy nutjobs, and anarchy.


BACK UP YOUR STATEMENTS!


Maybe the Chinese are... are they a close US ally? No... so what's your point? And as to the US doing it, prove it.


Oh, the world has seen worse... much worse. They're just fairly intractable... but again... what do you want to do about it?


Send in troops? Kill people to stop other people from killing people?

I thought killing people was wrong? So wouldn't killing other people to stop them from killing other people be wrong too?


Two wrongs don't make a right after all... right?


or is your whole logic train need a complete reevaluation? The point is obvious.


Saddam was running a brutal dictatorship... he commited acts of genocide and we're still unearthing mass graves he dug.


Yet you impune us for ending his regime?


Which way will you have it? Do nothing or do something? You can't have your cake and eat it too... well... not unless you're living in a fantasy land and are deeply deluded.


barbaric and outdated? You have a more civilized and modern approuch? Reality doesn't give a good god damn about your vision of what is moral or immoral. It simply is.


You are a mammal... your species must consume the fresh lifeforms of other entities. Your ability to survive with a quality of life higher then that of a chimp is due to your society's farming creatures... controlling nature. Feeding animals... fattening them up and then slaughtering them as needed.


That is reality. Even if you only eat plants... and that's almost impossible unless you're ironically living in an industrialized society... but even then... you're still dominating another life form and feeding upon it.


Human society is about politics... perceptions... passions... ego... self interest... fear... hatred... and idealism...


it is not pretty or neat or simple. Expecting or demanding it to be so is to put it bluntly... stupid. Intelligence is often described as the ability to perceive patterns in complex sets of data that don't seem to have anything to do with each other or even conflict with themselves. Wisdom is the ability to accept the world for what it is and know that if you are to change it you will have to work with in it's own rules.


Expecting things to be simple is stupid... and expecting the world to conform to any ideal is foolish.


Love and peace, Karmashock.

Think of the random 'dissapearances' that happen in the more remote areas of the country.



It worked in Seirra Leone, I can't see why it cant work in the rest of Africa. If UN notions had more international(and monetary) support then Africa would have been transformed decades ago.



I would do something, but not something that would involve killing as many people as he was killing. Think about it, he might have killed thousands, hundreds of thousands, we are doing the same thing now. Inderectly of course, but it still counts. Now the country and maybe the region is on the brink of a war that will cause dire consequences for the entire world.



Sending in troops would fail anyways, with or without actual battle.



Hypocrit.

its certainly not the bears in maine!

we tried that, it didnt work.

Well then we didnt try hard enough.

TGE,

The United States and its allies cannot go into every nation that is killing its own citizens en masse, especially if we're not allowed to kill people while doing it. Don't get me wrong, I'm basically an optimist. I believe that people can make things better (though never perfect). However, shipping off a bunch of troops to every nation which violates human rights is not practical. Furthermore, it is US interference in nations and our belief that we know what's right for the world which gets us into trouble with other cultures. Darfur, specifically, is a bad enough situation to warrent an intervention from the West, but nations like Congo, Iran, Somalia, and others all have many human rights abuses. Are we supposed to intervene in ALL nations with those problems?



Tell that to the people of Bosnia.



What you are missing is that economic aid is not the only thing required to build a successful nation. Institutions like governments with legitimacy from the people (not neccessarily democracies as non-democracies can be seen as legitimate by the people as well), mostly non-corrupt bureaucracies (some corruption is almost inevitable), and strong political parties (to help nations from being dependent on one or two charismatic leaders). Furthermore, for modern nations, nationalism is required, people have to be more connected with the state than their region or tribe within the state. Political stability has to be achieved with the ability of a state to peacefully pass power both between factions in a generation and from one generation to another. All these things take time, effort, and a lot of money. Furthermore, states in transition from poor traditional governments (like feudalism and monarchy) to (relatively) wealthy modern governments, often go through a lot of chaos and turmoil to get there.

Europe didn't acquire modern, stable, industrialized governments overnight. There were hundreds of years in transition from feudalism to centralized nations to industrialized democracy. The rest of the world has had much less time to catch up and many parts of the world are doing impressively well for how long they've had to become modern (like modern South Africa and Brazil). But in those nations, economics alone did not make them (relatively) stable and properous nations. Many of the factors which caused their rise had to developed by the people of the nations themselves. You can't impose something like a sense of national identity or strong political parties which become a vehicle for greater political participation. Only the people of those nations themselves can do it. Often, that means a lot of blood must be shed because of the resistance of some groups (like those who maintain tribal loyalties or authoritian rulers).

Killing is not always wrong. Killing can be used to stop even more horrific killings or oppression. Saying that no one should kill anyone else is nice and fine until a Hitler comes around and wants to kill you. I know this has become cliche but it is true, freedom is not free. Modernization is not free. Doing what is right often takes killing. That does not mean that killing should be a first resort or something to be taken on lightly, but in certain circumstances it must be done.

Serial killers, died in the wilderness and eaten by animals, aliens, could be any of those.

Yeah, but you don't go around shooting every other bear int he woods.



Careful, methinks you phrased yourself wrong. Either that, or you really would prefer it if the cops let the psychopath with a gun shoot you in the head rather than shoot.

Furthermore, if I see someone with a bloody knife in hand is walking towards a child, with another child nearby having severe lacerations, that someone is dead. Fast, hard, dirty, however I have to do it. Dead is dead... so I won't bother with any BS about a fair fight. I might warn him, if I don't think it'll jeopardize the second child. Thats about it. And if you want to call me wrong... well, you figure out the rest of the sentence. If you need a clue, it involved anatomically difficult actions.



"Dangerous experiments" is such a lovely phrase. Did you know that some people call driving dangerous? They're perfectly correct, too -- its easy to get yourself killed on the roads if you or anyone else gets careless.

And don't forget your tin hats!

You hit on the reason for those disappearances yourself: its occurring in remote areas of the nation. As in not highly populated, normally rather wild terrain. You get hurt there, you either drag yourself to other people or you die. And if its the latter, odds are very good your body is never found either because animals dispose of it, or no one stumbles across it for a few hundred years.

Oh, and people can vanish into thin air for perfectly good reasons -- like not wanting to be found by their family until after they can tell said family to shove its well-meaning, smug, self-centered BS where the sun don't shine.

Karm, so often I agree with you but I do need to make a correction here. We (America) have commited war crimes as discribed under UN Charter, the difference is those crimes were commited by officers in the field and were convicted under the UCMJ and it never made it to the UN. but alas our hands are not without some blood.

We didn't sanction at any level of government -- they were engaged against our laws (hence the conviction) and as such our hands are just a little bit cleaner than the Nazi's and the like, who approved such horrible actions, and rejoiced in them.

I'm sorry, but I have to jump in as a dissenting American.

We are the only country to ever have engaged in nuclear war.
We are the largest military-industrial complex in the world.
We have and operate secret "black prisons" and use torture as a means of interrogation.

I'd say these acts and other's (loss of habeas corpus, a merc army a la Blackwater) could give cause to say that the US has lost its way as well. War crimes, terrorism, "enhanced interrogations techniques" whatever bs names you want to use, I think the bush regime is comparable to the nazi regime.

I see our President Bush has not been brought up on any "War Crimes" - hmmmmmmmmmm.
Could it be because ALL governments play this game?
I wonder whats the lesser of 2 evils: destruction or self-destruction.
It seems the United States of America is on a path of destruction (according to the way I percieve others as seeing it); "Illegal Wars", "Unjust Justice", so where does that leave our common enemy? Perhaps, maybe ... on a path of self-destruction?
I agree that "picking up rocks and chucking them" at each other may not be the best solution to problems, but that leads me to another delima: "How do I get rid of termites?"
you might be thinking "wtf do termites have to do with anything here", but the simalarities are endless.
Example: what do I do if termites invade my house? They can cause alot of issues - even disease. So what do I do?
I don't move/relocate (sooner or later I would run out of places to move too). I don't tear down my house and rebuild with materials that termites don't like (sooner or later I would have to use some material that a termite eats). I DON'T strap a bomb to my back, walk in my house, and pull the cord!
Again hmmmmmmmmmm ...
Well its obvious - get rid of them (by all means nessesary) while perserving as many lives as possible.
Sure, there will still be a few more out there, and we wont be able to get rid of all of them, but the less I have to deal with - the better off I am. Which leads me back to OUR common enemy. Like it or not you have to deal with them, and the less of them I have to deal with - the better!
So please, leave me out of your self-destructive thinking, I'm more a destructive kinda guy.

that doesn't prove anything... just because people disappear does not mean anything is happening to them... they could just be leaving their homes or family because they want to start over.


Proof of something you're just making crap up.


and it's irrelevant anyway as china isn't a close US ally... this is pointless.




it would be a blood bath fighting off the warlords.


and you'd blame anyone that supported for making it so... which ironically you wouldn't just so you could say we should do nothing.


so that now when we do nothing you can complain about that too...


It's a no win situation under your logic so why should anyone respect it... it's divorced from reality.




Well that's what happens when you take an ethnically tense area under the domination of a police state and try to introduce it to liberal democracy.


What would your grand solution be for fixing Iraq?


If you haven't got one then you don't have an answer for the warlords either. Most of them are killing people for the same reason Saddam killed people. IT's all tribal.




So I guess you're going to take down the warlords with stern letters and maybe email them pictures of you making an angry face?...


Tell me how that works out for you *chuckles*


Not at all... love and peace with this many people requires law and order... it requires civilization... and how can you have peace with this constant tribal infighting?

A few brief wars followed by lengthy occupations are about the only way to fix it.


You have no ideas so I don't see that you have the right to complain. When you do have an idea, then maybe your opinion will be worth a damn.

That's because people who win wars have no one to bring them to war crimes trials.

Speaking of war crimes, the first war crimes trials at Nuremburg were actually kind of a legal farce. Yes the holocaust did happen and it was horrible, I'm not saying that. Yes Germany did start an aggressive war, again I'm not saying the Nazis were good in any fashion. They were evil bastards. However, the "crimes against humanity" charges were NOT considered crimes at the time of the holocaust. So the German leaders were punished under ex post facto laws (laws passed after the crime takes place). Under the US and British constitutions that is patently wrong and illegal (technically under the Soviet constitution as well but the Soviets started ignoring their constitution on day 1). Under a Kantian perspective, using ex post facto laws against the Nazis was wrong. But this is a perfect case of utilitarianism being used properly. What the Nazis did was so horrible that they had to be punished. But no laws existed to punish them that laws had to be made up after the fact. If the US government tried doing that to one of its citizens, the Supreme Court would strike it down in a heart beat (hopefully). But against the Nazis it was required.



It takes more than just a long occupation. It takes a well run occupation with clear, achieveable goals and a proper framework. Our occupation of Iraq lacks many of those things (as did our occupation of South Vietnam). The "benchmarks" do provide clear goals (finally), but are they the right goals?

The current Iraqi governmental system is a unitary government where the national government has all the power and the provinces get power only through the national government. This means that if one group controls the national government, they control the nation and the provinces are secondary as the national government can just take away their power.

I believe there is a better solution which MIGHT work as opposed to the current solution which almost certainly WON'T work in the end.

The government ought to be a federal government. What I mean by that is that the national government cannot on a whim curtail the powers of the provincial governments (kind of like how the US works in theory). The national government would deal with issues like foreign policy, the military, inter-provincial commerce, immigration (IF any immigrates to Iraq), and oil sharing. The provinces would have power over everything dealing soley within the province (social problems, intra-provincial commerce, etc.). That way the Sunnis would be ruled by Sunnis, Kurds by Kurds, Shiites by Shiites and on group would not impose its ideas on how to live or run the domestic matters of the nation on the other two groups.

Now you may ask, "But as time went on the US national government took more and more power. How would Iraq be any different?" True and Iraq might not be any different. But consider that it took 150 years and some damn important issues (like segregation and preventing a socialist revolt in the Great Depression) to make the national government as powerful as it is today (though some modern trends have been slowly giving a few powers back to the states). After even only 50 years if the Iraqis still can't see each other as one nation and tear apart due to the powers of the national government then that is completely their proble not ours. Now our occupation shouldn't take 50 years, probably by instituting this we could end it in 10-15 years if it is going to work.

This plan may not work, but if it doesn't then I can only see a totalitarian government working. We'd might as well pull out if a democratic government won't work in Iraq because a totalitarian dictator would probably end up killing as many people as a civil war (which would end in a totalitarian dictator or Iraq being divided up). I don't particularly care if Iran takes over the shiite lands as they still would not be able to threaten the US with anything short of nukes/chemcial and biological weapons. A gain in territory would not significantly shift the balance of power between the US and Iran so that if Iran wanted to try and take over say Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, the US could still defend those nations relatively easiely.

*puts on tin hat*

the earth is flat, the earth was created 1000 years ago, the sun revolves around the earth, two headed siamese triplet aliens eat and regurgitate dogs in a 30 nanosecond cycle (its so fast you cant see 'em), the brain is a fabrication, you're head is actually empty.

etc. etc.

SoG, very well... what is your long term solution?


As to the US taking a long time to develop... it only took about 20 years really for it to solidify. Mostly it was states... but those states were solid. The civil war really made it clear that the Feds were powerful enough and willing to prevent any state from going against congress.

Which happened less then 100 years after the founding of the country.


Perhaps the solution instead should have been to work on specific Iraqi states. Iraq is already federated... but perhaps we're putting too much emphases on the central government when we should be simply working on making the various territories more powerful. Work on governors and district councils... etc...

Get me one of those Schem.

Maybe a pair of earmuffs too

Us non-mortal beings need some quite from the banter of the less devine.

a litttle cleaner? we have a few drops on us compared to the olympic sized pool of it they have