The Opinionated Bastard

Not to oversimplify this, but I have a supervisor that puts a little saying on his e-mails:

“Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.”

I think it’s rather appropriate.

The full quote is: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

It’s by Edmund Burke

That IS a good quote.

And I have the same thoughts that you do when I hear the media almost gleefully proclaim more deaths in Iraq - I believe that many more people would be dead (and probably tortured first) had we not intervened. It makes me wonder - does the anti-war crowd consider American lives to be more valuable than Iraqi lives? It seems like it.

This is an excellent article regarding the “morality” of the Iraq war - it’s old, but still makes some good points, including reasons to believe that Saddam had WMDs.

One cannot claim that saddam killed 2.5 million of his own people in the 1990s. Economic sanctions and a destroyed infrastructure due to US bombing killed those people. The easy common sense proof of this is if it is the case that saddam was actively killing 2.5 million people why didnt the corporate media report on this ad nauseum throughout the 90s and leading up to the lies which led to the war? the fact is the US corporate media remained silent due to US complicity in these deaths, a fact that the US people were largely ignorant of, but the world was not.

Believe bin laden or not, but the US was not attacked for its “freedoms” and “moral values” but for the crimes it supports in its quest for the maintenance of global power. it is a globalized world indeed, with the imperial violence now coming home.

and of course the US supported, funded and armed Saddam Hussein throughout the 1980s and funded armed and supported the mujahadeen warriors bred in saudi arabia to fight the USSR for central asian oil. so we now have blowback where our nutty mujahdeen now hates us. (for reference here..see RAMBO 3 where sly blesses the “holy warriors” of carter and reagan”

ernie

I certainly can claim that, Saddam was a big boy, and he chose how to spend the money he did get, and it was on him. Meanwhile, medicine brought under the Oil-For-Palaces program showed in in bazaars throughout the middle east…

Actually, the head of CNN confessed that in order to get more access to Iraq, they intentionally supressed those stories about what was going on in Iraq.

I think you need to go read some Iraqi blogs, look up “Carnival of the Liberated” and read some old posts on what it was like living under Saddam.

Supported, funded and armed Saddam is an overstatement. After the Iran hostage crisis, the Europeans and the Saudis hit upon the idea of playing off Iraq agaisnt Iran. We went a long with that, but mostly half-heartedly (we reclassified his country from “terrorist”, to “merely evil”). We never actually sold him weapons, but the Saudis and Kuwaitis loaned him a bunch of money, and the Germans and French built him the infamous WMD plants.

We did sell him some stuff we wouldn’t normally have sold a terrorist government, like Chlorine, computers, food dye, but that was mostly stupidity on our part.

Anyways, I’ve read Bin Laden’s rants, and he does attack us precisely for our freedoms: he thinks the Middle East should become one giant Islamic Dictatorship. Kind of like “Those US supported dictatorships are bad, it should be an Islamic Dictatorship with me instead.”

As far as the afghanistan blowback, mostly that was the stupidity of letting Pakistan control our aid money. The ISI screwed us on that, but that gets into my long time complaint that the CIA needs more spies and less computers.