Libertarianism and Conservatism vs. Liberalism and Progressivism

Oh, yes, immediately after we took out Saddam, the Iraqi people could have withstood anything, especially given how united they are as a people. It's weird that Saddam was the one thing they couldn't handle. You'd think, if they could be "enabled" so easily, they could have taken out Saddam themselves.

Yep, that sure makes it sound like it is all Carter's fault, all right. It's almost like he let the Iranian people decide for themselves, the bastard. Apparently "the people" being "enabled" isn't a good thing when it comes to Iran, just Iraq.

barfo

 

Next you'll tell me HuffingtonPost is right wing. I already posted the abcnews.com link discrediting the Lancet report. Another right wing organization.

Anyone with modest math skills would realize that 650,000 dead would mean ~200 died every day for 10 years, which flies in the face of that common sense. However, Lancet claims it all happened from 2003 to 2006, which would be 600 a day. Preposterous.

http://www.pollster.com/blogs/aapor_censures_lancet_iraq_cas.php?nr=1

AAPOR Censures Lancet Iraq Casualty Survey

My colleagues at the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) announced yesterday that an eight month investigation found that Dr. Gilbert Burnham violated AAPOR's Code of Professional Ethics and Practices.

At issue is the controversial study (pdf) of civilian deaths in Iraq conducted by Burhnam, a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and published in the journal Lancet in 2006. The study was the subject of considerable criticism because it produced a significantly higher estimate of Iraqi deaths than those of the Iraq Body Count project, the United Nations and the Iraqi Ministry of Health (for more details see the reporting by my National Journal colleagues, Slate's Fred Kaplan and the review on Wikipedia).

 

Are you pretending to be ignorant, or is it real?

Saddam murdered his political opponents over the years, starting with day 1. Or had them taken from their homes in the middle of the night and locked up in Abu Grahib or worse.

And when the people did rebel, he murdered 300,000 of his own people using WMDs. I don't fault them for not being able to overthrow a brutal dictator who spent $billions of oil money on one of the largest militaries in the world.

 

Did we prop up the dictator in Africa? To what extent? How many of his countrymen died because of our intervention there?

The answers to these questions do dictate what kind of reparations we are morally obligated to provide.

We do have obligations to live up to treaties. It's in the constitution:

Article IV

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

 

A military made up of... those exact same Iraqi people who you think could not have toppled Saddam but could have defended themselves against all comers if we'd pulled out.

barfo

 

Who are these "all comers?"

Like any left-wing authoritarian society, he really paid those soldiers well and they had all the best weapons (even WMDs). They managed to fight to a draw with Iran before, and there's no guarantee Iran had the stomach to try and give it a go again.

And us removing our troops doesn't preclude us trading with the Iraqis and even providing weapons.

I'd point out that favorable trade conditions are another way to provide reparations.

 

Yes, Saddam was such a left-winger. And Gaddafi is a Libertarian.

barfo

 

Yep, left wing. When you have a command economy, it's left wing.

Bin Laden would be the right winger, eh?

 

You do realize that one of the promises made was that by creating an arab democracy in Iraq, there'd be a domino effect like we're seeing (the uprisings).

I already posted this, but GHW Bush made the kinds of promises you mentioned - they did have an uprising and thought they were going to get support that never came, and were crushed. I don't see why they'd believe us a second time if we made that same promise.

The guy murdered over 2M Kurds in the Al Anfal campaign in the mid-to-late 1980s and another 300,000+ after Bush urged the uprising. I think we all wish the people could have taken out Saddam on their own.

There was a convergence of events that made taking out Saddam an immediate priority.

He had WMDs and used them, and there was every reason to expect him to use them again.

We had to institute no fly zones to keep Saddam from gassing his people even more. Our planes were fired upon routinely.

The sanctions put on Iraq through the UN were a miserable failure. The UN has been proven corrupt throughout the whole thing, Saddam raised $billions in cash and built palaces with the money intended to feed and provide medicine for his people. Children died en masse for lack of food and medicine.

At least three nations on the Security Counsel (France, Russia, China) were ready to end sanctions and inspections and resume ordinary relations with Iraq.

 

The timing wouldn't be 8 years after Iraq, but shortly after we pulled out 50,000 troops and declared the military conflict over. Not that this is causal to the rebellions in other countries.

From a strategic POV, consider Iraq is due west of Iran and Afghanistan is due east of it. A sandwich of sorts. Toppling the leadership in Iran seems to me to be the intent of the two wars.

Mubarak was quite involved between the US and Saddam all along. We've been giving Egypt $billions in military aid since the 1970s, which would be propping him up. However, Egypt is not known as a place where tens of thousands of people are mass murdered.

Tunisia is less than half the size of Iraq (population) and has a military of 27,000 men and 84 tanks. Iraq had a military of 500,000+ with the kind of materiel to fight a sustained war with Iran.

 

Nope. Libertarian all the time.

If right-wing means "anarchy" then I'm not all the way right-wing.

 

Which part do you quibble with?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

The early liberal thinker John Locke, who is often credited for the creation of liberalism as a distinct philosophical tradition, employed the concept of natural rights and the social contract to argue that the rule of law should replace absolutism in government, that rulers were subject to the consent of the governed, and that private individuals had a fundamental right to life, liberty, and property.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism#Liberalism

The term "progressive" is today often used in place of "liberal." Although the two are related in some ways, they are separate and distinct political ideologies and should not be used interchangeably. The reason for this confusion might partly be rooted in the political spectrum being two-dimensional; social liberalism is a tenet of modern progressivism, whereas economic liberalism (and its associated deregulation) is not.

 

I'm going to guess this part:

That's (a) not true, and (b) biased.

For example, one social problem we have today is that many people do all their socializing on the net, and so they are disconnected from reality and believe in black-and-white solutions to complex real-world problems. Unfortunately, there is no known government program that will cure libertarianism.

barfo