Also, I have a question about democratic peace theory. Which country is the despotic tyranny, argentina or the united kingdom?–Malachi
Argentina was run by a military junta during the Falkland War. Check your history, I think you miss that one since I know you will agree with me that a military junta should not even remotely considered a liberal democracy.
so you agree with me that the us military occupation’s continued failure to secure muthanna chemical complex from public access is a terrible wrong? This act of omission makes weapons of mass destruction available for anyone at all who is motivated to scavenge for it. – Malachi
Then you support the invasion in Iraq in 2003 instead of contining the counterproductive policy of supporting the Iraq government. Bush was the only President to act on principle by not supporting the Iraqi military or continuing a failed sanctions regime that was the motivation for 9/11. It is hypocrisy that those that criticize the war in 2003 have yet to offer a viable solution, save criticism of past policies that the Bush administration inherited.
In 2003, you had three options:
(1) Continued use of sanctions and diplomacy against Iraq despite the fact that this action was causing great suffering to the most vulnerable and innocent in Iraq while having virtually no effect at moderating Saddam’s behavior. Equally important was the animus created in the Islamic and Arab world from the sanctions that were a recruiting boom for regional terrorist organizations. Note that one of the primary motives for bin Laden’s attack on the US in 2001 was in protest of sanctions against Iraq and its impact on Iraqi women and children.
(2) Resumption of hostilities against Iraq for violating the ceasefire of 1991 with a goal of removing Saddam and installing a Western ally and representative government in its place.
(3)Do nothing and allow Saddam to reconstitute his WMD program as he stated was his intention while incarcerated by the US military after his capture in 2003. |
Of course, yours would have been isolationism or do nothing approach that would have led to a nuclear armed Saddam — a perfect example of what happens in an anarchist ‘paradise’
to what end? I thought you wanted to help these people? Now you suggest WW2-style atrocity as a realistic alternative? Hahahahahaha you are a troll, go back under your bridge.–Malachi
Come down Tex. It is obvious to any objective observer that my point was that the US doesn’t do genocide. We could, but we don’t for moral reasons. Yet, you and those on the Left continue to attack the US as a conquering imperial power when nothing could be further from the truth. Hypocritically, the anarchist and Leftist frequently cite the real imperial despots as victims of American power which is equally disjointed thinking. Hence, you find yourself defending rogues like Saddam which has to make your head hurt.
I am more than familiar with the cult of technohomocide and the billions of dollars in wealth spent on devising ever more expensive and sophisticated weapons so we can continue to kill people suspected of the crime of having the wrong political system in their own country with ever-greater impunity. The funny thing is, expensive and powerful weapons do not eliminate moral hazard, they only serve to mitigate it in some circumstances. You usually have to get close to the enemy to identify them as enemy.
You will probably misinterpret me and think I am anti-pgm. I do not support the irresponsible use of any weapon.-- Malachi
I challenged you in a few earlier posts to name a period in European history that was more free, peaceful, prosperous, and stable than under current American hegemony in the form of liberal democracy and you cited the pre-colonial period.
I will allow you to retract this period as your ‘sterling’ example of ‘paradise’ since it involved constant conflict, poverty, pitiful life expectancies, high infant mortality, subsistance living, absolute no freedoms, no upward mobility for the average Joe and monarichal despotism on a grand scale. It wasn’t until classical liberalism emerged and with it liberal democracy, capitalism and the industrial revolution that living standards began to improve.
It wasn’t until higher order liberal democracies emerged in the middle 20th century in the Western Hemisphere (Chile, US, Canada…), all of Europe, and most of the Pacific Rim that peace become a real possibility for the future of mankind.
Try reading Rummel and ask me to clarify any issues you have with democratic peace theory since folks like Hoppe severely misrepresent this threory in their essays. I don’t know why they do this, perhaps ignorance or maybe bias, but it needs to be addressed so you understand the framework of the theory better.
“exploited” is your term. I said it is a foreign military dictatorship and it is undesired. As for your statistics, I am aware that iraq has been among the beneficiaries of our massive expenditure of wealth over these past 10 years. Of course, that impoverishes us and artificially stimulates the iraqi economy, making a bust inevitable. But thats ok for you, because when the us leaves and the money stops flowing, and iraq is plunged into turmoil again, then you can claim that the iraqis simply do not know how to live without jackbooted american soldiers killing them with billion-dollar bombs.-- Malachi
Like you, I recognize the limits and waste associated with profligate govt. spending.
I don’t believe in nation building or using conventional forces to fight small scale insurgencies. When we committ our Cadillac military forces to this kind of conflict we are not taking advantage of our strengths. We should be providing small scale technical support and training to indigenous fighters whose interests are aligned with our own. An analogy would be to lend a shotgun and provided training in its use to a good neighbor being terrorized by a gang of thugs.
However, our welfare state (corporate cronyism, unionism, environmentalism, social security, medicaid and medicare) are open-ended committments that dwarfs any spending in Iraq. These are the real threats. Ironically at the height of Iraq war spending in 2007, the budget deficit was $150 billion, yet when we downsized our committment thanks to the success of the Surge the deficit increased an order of magnitude to $1.5 trillion thanks to domestic waste and regulation.
iraq was not a neighborhood of the us, dude.–Malachi
Wow, here is where you blew it dude. You base ‘neighborhood’ in the geopolitik by physical distance when nothing could be further from the truth. Globalization has created a new dynamic in which we are all neighbors. your thinking on this matter is indeed pre-colonial.
Answer me this, if china invades iraq, kills all the americans and destroys/dismantles the ia and the ip’s, lets everything go to shit for about 6 months, then spends a couple fucking years rebuilding the country, they have elections, and published statistics show even fewer deaths than under the americans, will you consider that a good thing or a bad thing?-- Malachi
This is what China has done against virtually all of its neighbors since 1949 when the communists took power murdering 100 million innocents and enslaving a billion more in the process but I can bet you cant produce a single post on this website condemning any of this action.
This fact speaks volumes about what you stand for and the hypocrisy of your one-sided rhetoric.
the only difference between China, USSR and the USA is that when the USA establishs temporary hegemony peace, prosperity, stablity, free markets, free elections and free speech prevail. See Europe, see Western Hemisphere, see our Asian allies. ALL of them better off than ever before in their violent and despotic pasts.
ok now I am getting a little angry. Point out where I defended saddam or apologize for the implication.–Malachi
I will let you answer the question.
Would Iraq have been better off without removing Saddam from power ?
living standards in iraq have decreased since 2003. Human rights in iraq are both better and worse than under saddam. Familiarity with a situation provides a nuanced perspective that state-sponsored and corporate media work hard to erase.–Malachi
Produce your source !
MOre importantly, living standards that include a tremendous increase in electronic communications that provide heretofore denied access to global media, business opportunities, commerce and entertainment has dramatically increased the potential today and in the future for all Iraqis.
Or do you consider life under a despot who has a monopoly on all information an improvement over the current situation ?
why do you count non-iraqis in saddam’s death count? Is it because intellectual honesty does you no favors in this argument?-- Malachi
What ?! You place different values on human life based on nationality ?!
Saddam kills an Iranian or a Kuwaiti or an Israeli we aren’t supposed to count these innocents ?!
nonsense. First of all, there is no such thing as “latent” amounts of hostilities. Such an idea presupposes a constant and irremovable source of hostility, could this be a state? Secondly, the statistics on american deaths are skewed by the massive amount of support personnel who never leave the wire. The servicemember who exposes himself to the population at large still has plenty of opportunities to die for his country, although this is becoming the case less often than ever, since we have been engaging the populace less and less since 2008 as they handed the security roles off to iraqi units. The vast majority of the patrols now are just security missions in the open desert, dont even get out and talk to people any more. Which is because of the long slow drawdown, and starting in 2012 americans will not be exempted from iraq law so why do you think we are leaving? Its not because they might have to pa taxes or something. It has to do with americans being prosecuted for negligent homicide.- Malachi
No your rationalization is nonsense. Your statement proves my point. Americans are no longer needed to provide the bulk of security and yet violence has declined significantly and Iraqis are running the show without American assistance, debunking your repeated assertion that things are so bad in country. AMericans are more likely to die driving a Humvee too fast then from any kind of hostile action.
And reading between the lines regarding 2012 and Americans not being protected from immunity debunks your earlier assertion that this is an occupation force bent on empire. What kind of empire surrenders the legal authority of its invading army to the vanquished?
riggenbach isnt posting here, if his argument is so solid you ought to be using it here because your arguments are shoddy as hell. We reject your mention of riggenbach as an argument, because you are using him as an argument from authority. Quit casting aspersions on people and respond to their arguments. Or are you out of steam-- Malachi
Read or listen to his essay which supports my points before simply discounting it out of hand. Tell me specifically where Riggenbach is wrong.
There is a credible study that estimates over 600,000 iraqis have been killed. There is even a study (albeit heavily criticised) that estimates the total at over 1 million iraqi civilian dead. If you look at the data as a whole, you see that the iraq body count and associated press reports establish a kind of floor, documenting verified corpses known to be killed in violent action. Isnt it weird how, just like I told you, the number directly from the US govt is even lower than that? So if we throw out the highest and the lowest as outliers and take the studies in the middle to be valid totals and estimates, and err on the conservative side, we get “somewhere between 100,000 and half a million” just like I said.–Malachi
Your bad science and ‘logic’ wouldn’t hold up in a 6th grade social science class. You can’t take bias, unreliable, and invalid research and find an average.
Cite your specific studies so I can debunk them at my leisure and have a good laugh at the same time. Start with the Lancet study that refuses to release raw data that was funded by George Soros and edited by Horton that is the laughing stock of academia. Or try citing the oft debunked British private study that claims 200, 000 Iraqis died from car bombs in four years that equates to over 135 dead per DAY !!
In fact, I challenge you to name just ten days in a row when the average of 135 Iraqis died from car bombs.
You got to do better than this, you just wasted a hefty paragraph exposing the folly of your argument on Iraqi casualties.
How can you claim that a constitutional republic decentralizes power, when it empowers a singular entity, the state, at the expense of every non-state actor? --Malachi
Nothing like omitting a key word or phrase in a statement of mine.
A constitutional FEDERAL republic does provides substantive decentralization of power between the people, state, and federal govt. The republic side of the equation provides the people with the power to choose representatives and the constitution provides for inviolate rights as spelled out in the bill of rights and subsequent amendments.
An anarchist society (if one ever existed for more than a fortnight when contiguous to a statist regime) has no mechanism or institutional framework to decentralize, balance, limit or make transparent the elements of coercion in society.
specialization of labor and economies of scale will lead to the formation of a geographic monopoly or cartel of the elements of coercion.
Once this happens all bets are off. You don’t have a liberal democracy, you have instant absolutism.
Unless you discount the adage that 'power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely"
Thanks for the reply and sorry for the length, It is unfortunate that these issues cannot be resolved with less bandwidth and prose. I don’t mind reading yours and replying since I am an old hand at this and frequently multi-task during the process. Hope it is not too ponderous for you that is why I tried to isolate my reply to one point, but these things are like snowballs.
