On Thu, April 13, 2006 14:58, John Lee said:
> I don't think we went into Iraq to ONLY check for WMD.  I think we went in
> to establish a military base from which we can monitor the activities of
> rogue nations who are intent on attacking us and randomly killing the
> citizens of free societies, as they have been doing unchecked for many
> years.  No one has ever stood up to this army before.  Now we are because
> we have to.  War is a dirty business, but what do you do when the enemy
> insists that the attacks will continue until all Americans are dead?
>
> John Lee
>
>


The capacity for self-deception exhibited in this missive is truly
alarming.  Whatever your personal opinion may be regarding suitable casus
belli, this is certainly NOT the argument that was made to the rest of
your fellow citizens to justify the invasion of Iraq.  On that basis alone
you, and all those who hold similar opinions, are guilty of a massive
fraud that has resulted in tens of thousands of pointless deaths.

However, I doubt that this is the case.  What you are displaying is the
degree that people who are faced with emotionally distressing
circumstances are sometimes willing to re-remember their past, which is
why personal memoirs are notoriously unreliable.  Refresh your memory by
re-reading the newspaper and magazine articles published in the six months
prior to and following March 20, 2003 and see if the story that they
present places a rather different emphasis on the role of WMDs justifying
unprovoked invasion and war than that you now recall.

What army?  What rogue states?  Which state attacked the United States of
America with an army?  Is OBL now elevated to the level of sovereign
power?  Are 15 men armed with box cutters now an army?  Is a
decentralized, scattered, and economically bereft criminal society now a
state? Is this rag-tag collection of misfits, miscreants and mystics now
what the citizens of the United States fear most?  The image of the poor,
hectored United States grimly standing-up to the great bully OBL and his
armies is as laughable in its conception as its mis-representation.

Attacking until every American is dead?  You ignore the plain fact that,
outside accidental death, the greatest threat to a person at large in a
free society is that posed by another citizen and the next greatest is
found in the official agents of his own state.  The number of people
killed by these so-called terrorists in the "free world" is a vanishingly
small number when contrasted to the violent deaths that we manage to
inflict on each other.  Last year (2005) and every year since 2001 over
16,000 U.S. inhabitants died violently at the hands of their fellow
citizens.  Since 9/11 over 60,000 have died in the continental United
States alone from this cause.

Outside of Iraq and including 9/11, how many have died due to terrorist
attacks, in total, worldwide, in the same time? I venture that it remains
somewhat less than 5000.  How many has the United States government killed
or caused to be killed since 2003 in this pointless revenge taking that is
going on in Iraq?  30,000? 60,000? 90,000?  At the very least there are
2,800 additional U.S. troops that would be alive today if this war had
never been.



-- 
***     e-mail is NOT a secure channel     ***
James B. Byrne                mailto:ByrneJB.<token>@Harte-Lyne.ca
Harte & Lyne Limited          http://www.harte-lyne.ca
9 Brockley Drive              vox: +1 905 561 1241
Hamilton, Ontario             fax: +1 905 561 0757
Canada  L8E 3CE               delivery <token> = hal

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *