laudablepuss wrote:

Their one and only argument with which to convince the fence sitters, oil conspiracies and sinister re-election theories aside, is that the weapons inspectors can succeed if we just throw more of them into Iraq (France's response to Powell's tour de force presentation on Iraqi weapons programs) and if we document all the stuff we couldn't inspect with our sattelites (which we are already doing) as if this was somehow the same thing as inspecting the shit that was smuggled out. Also, the fact that they are smuggling material out of sites before the "surprise inspection" occurs indicates that the Iraqis have infiltrated the inspection team, as they did the last time we tried this. The fact is, with Iraq actively sabotaging inspections, it's virtually impossible for the team to find anything of any substance at all or to have more than a tiny impact on Saddam's weapons development progress.

Just in case nobody's boiled it down for you: if Iraq is not disarming, and they CLEARLY are not, then they are in violation of the UN resolution. If a resolution can't be passed to authorize force in this matter, or if we do not act in a more or less unilateral manner, then it's a virtual garauntee that Saddam will have nuclear and other WMD in a matter of a few years. What do we do then? Isn't this the kind of appeasement that history despises Neville Chamberlain for?

Zseni's argument. Completely absurd. He's not a threat now, so we should wait until he becomes one. Or, we waited ten years, why not wait ten more? It makes no sense. We played with Iraq for ten years, and now we've figured out that it's just not going to work. Saddam has made it abundantly clear that he absolutely will NOT disarm and that we can't force him to with weapons inspectors. So what's left?

Ukraine, 2000. We threatened economic sanctions if they didn't implement fucking software piracy legislation (this diplomatic action bought & paid for by the RIAA/MPAA, duh). That said, opposing us for the sake of opposing us is fucking insane - France and Mandela and especially Germany are smarter than that. They all understand a few things: Saddam is about as likely to work with Al Quaeda as Bush is. Saddam will not be able to threaten the US in this decade. There are significant potential oil gains (I've highlighted these in one of the below threads) for the US. There are clear domestic political gains for our current unelected administration. Many of the more liberal Americans view our current administration's treatment of 9/11 as little more than a coup d'etat, and the lack of investigation as hinting at something more sinister. Oh wait, the current administration tried to get someone internationally deemed a war criminal and a man domestically known to represent government cover-ups to head a highly belated investigation. Europe in general is populated by persons of a more liberal mindset than America. The comparisons between Hitler and Bush that pop up aren't accidental - Hitler after an illegitmate power grab headed up a government wildly more right-wing than the other major governments in the rest of the world at the time, and one that eventually engaged in imperialism on the grandest scale possible with seemingly no trigger event.

Let's try to stay focused. Forget the 2000 presidential elections and whatever other stuff you've got stuck in your craw. I'm talking about France and their stonewalling of our efforts to disarm Iraq. We have excellent reasons to invade, France offers nothing and calls it an alternative. And here's you: "Saddam will not be able to threaten the US in this decade." Is this seriously your position: that we shouldn't go to war because nothing bad will happen for at least 10 years?

And are you seriously comparing Bush to Hitler? Is there a point in continuing this discussion?

By the way, is it your contention that if Iraq can't fire a missile accross the Atlantic that it can't threaten the US?

The trigger event was 9-11. Only a moron can't see this. Whether Saddam has ties to al-Quaeda or not is not the driving motivation here. We have been demonstrated to be vulnerable and we are now taking steps to lessen that vulnerability. For fucks sake, all we're asking is for the UN to back up it's resolutions! Where's the outrageous over-the-line demands here?