h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Ello M.,

Good to be getting stuck in again. After reading the article I linked to, were you swayed more to the legal or illegal side?

Dammit. I have to prepare to teach. I wish h2g2 was my full time job.

Ste

Della

I guess you can stop calling him "Tony B Liar"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3434661.stm

dave

I've always thought that the invasion of Iraq was illegal, Ste. So it didn't take much.

Again, however, I have to stress that illegal or not, it happened, and so the point is rather moot. The important question thus becomes: what do we do now?

Your link:
Been waiting 3 years for this day. I just love a "downsize" event!
Who says God does not work his stuff?

Montana has it right. The invasion, legal or illegal, is an accomplished fact. Personally, I think it was illegal and that Dubya will one day smoke a turd in hell's lake of fire for it (of course he will be sitting on Saddam shoulders, who will be perched on Stalin, who will be sitting on....well, you get the picture)
Consider this metaphor - the president/government is worried about a cult leader (WHO DOES NOT LIVE IN WACO TEXAS) who may be building bombs and hoarding guns and selling drugs. They surround his compound, which is lived in by hundreds of people, but he won't surrender. Some people who have been inside say "there are no bombs, leave him alone, he's harmless" others say he's abusing the children. The government is still worried about a big bomb so it attacks the place and shoots the cult leader dead. They don't find any bombs,guns and drugs but sure enough the kids have been abused. The problem is the raid has started a fire and everyone inside is liable to get burned up soon.
Should the government:

1)admit it broke the law, and just go home leaving the place burning and the abused kids abandoned in the burning building to fend for themselves

2)put out the fire, feed the kids, worry about firing the guy who decided to raid the place later

3)pay Haliburton a gazillion dollars to come in and put the fire out and make the children to work sewing american flags for a nickle a day until the gazillion is paid off, while insisting that just because it didn't find the bombs and drugs after eight month doesn't mean there are here somewhere.

Obviously the best course of action would be to go back in time and fire the idiot who ordered the SWAT team in, but since we can't do that, pick another option.

So this is all Janet Reno's fault?!

Trunt ole boy, when I praised you for your factual posting it was genuine. My comments were not directed at you in the least. Although I fear that between my withdrawal and return I have not remembered too much of it offhand

STE, welcome to our corner of the web. Your article goes to show one thing very clearly. That the intricacies of justifications, loopholes and conditions as to the legitimacy of the invasion of Iraq are muddied beyond repair. Your article while citing the resolutions and the charter itself makes equally strong cases for and against the war.

Red, the charter urges member states to "refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force." It is not an outright prohibition of military action. Each signatory state reserves the right to act in self-defence, with or without UN approval. Now is where we find the issue becoming trickier. When Powel stated that Iraq presented a "real and present danger" to the United States it technically legalized any action.

Now comes the counter. I feel it already. "Bush lied about weapons!!!" They will shout. Which is why we have such heavy amount of finger pointing going on in DC right now. Bush says the CIA gave him bad info, the CIA claims that Bush blew up the info that he was given, Kay still thinks that there are big stockpiles under the right rock out here.

However "Then, on 27 January 2003, Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, delivered this message to the Security Council: 'Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament which was demanded of it.'" The guy in charge of the inspection labelled Iraq as not being in compliance with inspections, in violating the resolution and therefore subject to "serious consequences."

STE I understand that the consequences were non-specific. However with the amount of sanctions already in place what was left to do? Send Saddam to bed without dinner? No, military action of some nature was the only option left.

Iraq was not in compliance with 687 or 1441. The UN was fully aware of the "all-pervasive repression and oppression sustained by broad-based discrimination and widespread terror" (their own words)that was Iraq. They were aware of the 12 years of sanctions that have failed to materialise into any form of compliance. They were also aware of the millions of dollars of income they generated administering the oil for food program. All of this and yet somehow, they failed to see that even if Bush was pushing the war for the wrong reasons, that it was a good and just war and that Saddam should not be allowed to continue in the path he was taking.

The UN has no teeth. The US can decide to take its 37 friends and go play in Iraq without UN approval just as easily as France, Germany and Russia can withhold UN approval from 37 nations. The UN is so wrapped up in perpetuating status quo that after 12 years of sanctions, non-compliance, brutality and terror Saddam would still be at it today if it were not for the US. The UN is not a governmental agency, it has no power to compel anyone to do anything. Unless it is given those powers (which I do not think the world is really ready for) things like this will continue to happen.

Bottom line. If I give in and say that the invasion was illegal and point out that it was also illegal when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, can we agree that sometimes moral has to take precedence over legal? Read those Amnesty International articles. Tell me that we did not liberate Iraq. Tell me that the people here were somehow better off with him than they will be with almost anything they get after today. A government that beheads a female doctor in the street because she is accused (without trial) of being a prostitute, that employs kidnapping rape and torture as easily as you use your keyboard should not have been allowed to continue simply because some committee somewhere can't get its act straight on when to say enough is enough.


I honestly no longer care legal/illegal it does not matter. It is done. Saddam's threat is neutralised. Even if he was not one to me or my daughter he was a threat to the sons and daughters of his own people.

I only ask one thing of all this. That the five-year-old Iraqi girl whose digital image is on my hard drive can grow up without fearing those abuses happening.

My point Flipper is that before your post lumping me in with your spat with ES I have had little to no contact with you for a while. Get over yourself and improve your aim

"Protect and defend the constitution of the United States from all enemies [Real and Imagined] Foriegn and Domestic and to obey the orders of those officers appointed above me." fits better I think.

Also your point about being asked for your ID card falls flat when, by your remark, an american uniform gets an ID request and it seems that PRESS gets a bullet *then* an ID check.

[email protected] - an email validator could not confirm it. But I did read some interesting articles on how to capture email sent to a fictional address.

rev, correct me if I'm wrong but isn't No3 happening already.

<>
When Dave the Oblivious began posting edited altered lying versions of what ES had said, for instance...Is that what you mean by behaving childishly? Why is everyone attacking ES, but not so much as lifting their *voices* against the like of Dave's misrepresentation?

'cos dave is american. They're treated special here

BB, I note you are the BB I call 2.0, the one who gets het up and makes personal attacks - not the other guy, who's often very reasonable... Sigh...
<
So, have the courage of your convictions - tell us who you think it is.

<>
So be it, I never said otherwise.
The war/invasion was illegal. It was supposedly because of Saddam Hussein's links to Al Quaeda (fictional) and the posession of WMD (equally fictional.)
International law permits war *only* in self defence - and it has to a real (not an imaginary) threat... Pre-emptive self defence is an absurdity.
I don't *care* what American law says, or what Dubya/Rice/Cheney/Rummy and co wrote into it. The war was, is and will be illegal. End of story. Why is that so hard to understand?

Thanks trunt, for the links.
<>
This is very interesting!

<>
Yes, absotively. I know I do!

Not necessarily, Dave. (In fact, I find what we've heard about Hutton's report, quite odd. It seems obvious to me that Blair *did* in fact sex up the dossier, given what the truth turned out to be!
<<"I have been brought up to believe that you cannot choose your own referee, and that the referee's decision is final," he added.

But he questioned whether Lord Hutton's "bald conclusions" on the dossier's production could be reconciled with the balance of the inquiry's evidence.

And he asked whether those conclusions about the use of sources whose remarks could not be verified, constituted a "threat to the freedom of the press in this country".>>
From the article you linked to..

<>
Thanks for the heads-up, Wraith...

Della

maybe no one had jumped on me 'cause I hadn't posted in the last 5-6 dots worth of conversatin. Maybe people have jumped on me for it, when it happened, but since it hadn't happened recently, they didn't feel the need to bring it up. What's your answer?

Why did wraith immediately insult Sarge after Sarge asked for a cease fire?

If you want, you can answer both questions in 1 post, you don't have to split it up into 2. Either way is OK of course.

dave

While we're on the subject of fake identities:

"<>
Thanks for the heads-up, Wraith... "

Della, didn't you mean to say Apparition?

dave

And last, but not least...

So one in the backlog asked why not pull out of Iraq right now. Then people went on to discuss, in a rational manner, relatively calmly and politely the pros and cons of this. That's all fine and good. I'd like to point out however, that whenever I've tried the same approach, a "what if" scenario it could be called, everyone has jumped on me saying it's impossible to make predictions. What if this, what if that they've said.

I personally think it's fine to speculate; but if we're going to use it everyone should be allowed to use it.

dave