Pangloss

I simply have no response to that. Shocked speechless. Oh well, it's just a discussion; no sense getting upset about it. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.

Well everyone has their own definitions, but you're not what I consider "far left". You act like you are, and you may even think you are, but you're far too intelligent, introspective, analytical and thought-provoking to fall for the kind of idiot traps that extremists constantly fall into (and in fact are incapable of NOT falling into, and more importantly, incapable of climbing out of). BTW, there's a big difference between labelling a category, and labelling an individual. The former is something everyone does. The latter is something nobody should do (at least not in polite company). I did the former, not the latter. If someone posted that "centrists are idiots", it might rile me up, but it would be inappropriate to cry foul, saying that that person insulted me personally. Nice post, IMM.

Well put (as usual). I don't have a problem with punishing them if they didn't follow procedure. What I have a problem with is punishing them if they DID follow procedure and a civilian still got killed. At this point we don't know if procedures were followed or not. So saying (as several have done above) that they should be punished based on the current information is about nothing more than ideology and opposition to the war or President Bush. Let me be clear: I don't have a problem with determining what really happened, fixing the procedures, and doing more to try to prevent this sort of thing. But there will always be a caveat to those fixes, and that caveat is "so long as it doesn't increase the danger to our troops". Period. Liberalism-uber-ales folks have a problem with Bush declaring the war to be over, and insist that it's still one today, right? So why wouldn't you extend that reasoning to include the troops who are actually in harm's way? Oh no, that reasoning has to be tossed aside, because it's not part of the agenda. It's SO much more important to look for any excuse to bash Bush or conservatives. Yeesh. That's just disgusting to me. BEYOND disgusting. I don't have a problem with opposing the President -- you've seen me do that many times. What I have a problem with is the discarding of logic and critical thinking *solely* for ideological reasons. No, sorry, I don't agree with that reasoning. Not when the bad guys are dressed as civilians. It's a short-term problem, Phi. War is ugly. Deal with it. This idea that war should be like peace is just absurd.

Ok, I will try again with a different quote. "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction....The chain reaction of evil--hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars--must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation." Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength To Love, 1963.

I guess I'll go along with your rant to a certain extent. It's a good set of complaints in general. But I think the targets your aiming at are really no different from the far left crowd. People who forgo logic and critical thinking because it's just easier to go along with whatever your friends/parents/coworkers believe.

It's nonsense that soldiers fear for their lives? Nonsense?! Surely you don't mean that, do you? Why are people beling so absolutist in this thread? Sitting in our comfortable chairs thousands of miles away is so easy. Pretending like it's all one thing or another. It's all so simple and straightforward, isn't it? Wow. I don't understand what's so hard to comprehend about soldiers having rules that encompass many levels of engagement and numerous possible situations. But if that's what you people need to tell yourselves in order to keep that ideological hatred going, well I guess that's what you need to do. Whatever it takes to fight and oppose the enemy, right? Yeesh. I need to find me some right-wingers to bash. I feel unclean.

I think Yoda said it best: Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. I sense much fear in you.

In saying it's beyond the pale I don't mean to suggest that you're being moronic or anything like that. I just think it would be a really bad move, for the reasons I stated above. Doesn't mean I don't respect your ideas.

As opposed to my country or yours, where we see how many suicide attacks per day? And this is the second time in this thread you've made gross assumptions about what I was saying. "Shoot first" is an invention out of *whole cloth* on your part. That would be like me saying that you're claiming it wouldn't even be okay to fire on a half-track full of stormtroopers taking careful aim. I'm not putting words in your mouth, so I'd appreciate it if you'd refrain from doing that to me. I won't ask you politely again. This is Iraq we're talking about. The single most dangerous place in the entire world. Your little rules are great for a little drive through Coventry on a Sunday after church. What they're good for in Iraq is getting more of your and my countrymen sent home in wooden boxes.

But the question here I think would really be whether or not "we're getting hit with dozens of suicide bomb attacks per day and this person might be yet another one" outweighs "that person might be a lost civilian". It's not New York or London we're talking about. It's Iraq.

You know, just as a side note, a lot of my friends question why I straddle the middle ground so often. I believe that to have a TRULY open mind you have to be willing to consider ALL possibilities, not just the ones that are politically correct, or that your friends prefer, or that are easiest to contemplate. I don't reject any of Anindya's suggestions -- I simply ask for evidence. That's it. If you believe something, great -- more power to you. If you want to convince me that it's true, back it up. Put another way, if you consider yourself to be a "liberal" or a "conservative", or if you (for example) immediately either *defend* or *oppose* whatever the Bush administration happens to do or announce on a given day, then your mind is closed. Stop pretending otherwise and just admit it -- you're biased, and it is affecting your judgement. That's not addressed to Anindya specifically, it's just a general comment about why I'm a centrist/moderate. I am one because, simply, I see anything else is a cop-out. A failure to admit bias and closed-mindedness. A failure, period. Of course, one of my friends points out that that is, in fact, a kind of closed-mindedness. That I'm basically refusing to admit the possibility that, for example, conservatives may be completely in the first and liberals completely in the wrong. (grin) But my defense to that argument is that I considered the possibility that he might be right. Whereas he (as a conservative) refused to consider that the opposite possibility might be true. So I won the debate.

I don't see what this has to do with the price of tea in China. That's like asking why Germany is an ally given the fact that some Germans are still abusive towards Jews. No country is perfect. This reminds me of a conversation I had once with the wife of one of my friends, a reasonably well-educated woman, with a Bachelor's degree in business administraion and a job with responsibility. She asked a group we were in at a party one time "why the government can't just release ALL the information about UFOs". The problem, of course, is not with her suspicions, but with her assumptions. (sigh) Oh well. North Korea declared its nuclear capability just a few weeks ago, more than a year after we invaded Iraq. Ditto the changes in negotiating strategies. But even if those things happened before Iraq, I don't see the relevence. We have to deal with many different nations in many different was. All nations do this. Ohhhhh I see, you were suggesting that all of this was *planned* -- that the administration knew all of this was going to happen in advance of the Iraq War. Wow... you sure give Bush a lot of credit for intelligence and foresight. I'm surprised -- most left-wingers think he's some kind of moron. Well that may play at Democratic Underground, but I think you'll find we set a different standard here. You may not believe this, but it is actually possible for someone to disagree with the war and NOT think it's some kind of massive, global conspiracy.

One interesting aspect of this, as mentioned by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times in his column yesterday, is that the geography of the situation, even with the Pipeline, is such that the oil can really only be sent to West Coast refineries, which are already operating at more or less capacity. So it's quite possible that the oil will be sold in Asian markets instead. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's interesting.

Here's a more straightforward link to the new trailer: http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/waroftheworlds/

Wups, you're right in that I got the number backwards, so call it $40-50 billion instead. But interesting enough, right after I wrote the above I dropped by the New York Times web site to read Thomas Friedman's weekly column, and it turned out to be about this same subject. He brought up a good point that I hadn't considered: So that puts the number back up around $250 billion. Plus the secondary cost of what happens to the value of T-Bills if China dumps them. Plus the actual cost of weapons and delivery systems. Sure they're concerned -- they're concerned about a lot of things. But they're going to look at your nuclear arming of Taiwan and call it an example of killing a fly with a tank instead of a flyswatter. For starters. I'm afraid they're just not going to thank you for vastly re-organizing the balance of power for the entire hemisphere. Think the Bush-bashing is bad now, do you? Anyway, these issues are just the tip of the iceberg. For starters, China has said quite clearly that giving Taiwan nuclear weapons will result in immediate attack. So you'd better keep that project secret, and good luck with that -- you're certainly risking a lot. Your suggestion is simply beyond the pale.

That would cost $160 billion immediately, and that's just for starters. That's not the cost of the nukes, mind you -- that's our 2004 trade deficit with China. Actually it'd be more than that, since the figure grew more than 30% from the 2003 number. http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html Not to mention immediately alienating much of that hemisphere, since none of those nations have nukes except for China, and they're all involved in on-again-off-again trade wars with Taiwan. Want to try Door #2?

Wow. Thanks for the additional info. All of this reminds me of John Boorman's excellent movie "The General".

I wouldn't mind seeing a forum rule that says that if someone asks for help, say with a computer problem, then they should not be met with "get Linux/Windows/Mac and you won't have that problem" kind of responses. That's just not helpful, and it's basically just going to send the poster tromping off in disgust.

There's just something really great about this story. For those who haven't heard, the basic story is that some IRA men got into a fight with a couple of men (also Catholic) in a bar. One of the non-IRA men was killed. The IRA men told the 70-odd bar patrons that it was IRA business and they'd better keep their mouths shut. But it turns out the dead man was a father of two kids and a respected member of the community (or at least had a lot of friends). Next thing you know, there's a massive hue and cry from the guy's family, mad at the IRA for killing the guy, and now there's a media frenzy about it. According to the story I saw on ABC News last night, the IRA apologized for the men's actions and actually offered to have them killed! (Good god!) The family turned down their offer and continues to protest. The story over here in the states is mainly focused at the moment on the fact that this is the first St. Patrick's day in many years in which Sinn Fein wasn't invited to the White House. That may not sound like much overseas, but it'll make huge waves in the Irish-American community in the northeastern states. Here's a link to a story at ABC News that covers that angle a bit: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=590517 Fascinating stuff. I say good for those women, standing up to hoodlums like that.

And the right-wingers say "Clinton got a pass on Monica but Bush faces constant abuse over PDB memos". SSDDYAWN. But I know you agree that the inquiry to find out what happened here should be based on facts, not ideologies. (That appears to be the difference between your position and Anindya's.) We don't know that they were shooting to kill, that's an assumption on your part. We also have input from both Americans and Italians that tells us that shooting was not the first or the only effort made to stop the car. But I know that's not as much fun to contemplate. What was that about ignorance and bliss?

LOL. I should get paid for set-up lines like that. I'll set 'em up, and you and Phi can knock 'em out of the park.

Well that's a very reasonable position (or so it seems to me), and if you'd started with something more along those lines you might have gotten a more satisfying response from the folks here. My mother used to say, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything." Words I often wish I remembered at heated moments instead of just at calm, lucid ones. ;-) At any rate, since your last post was more reasonable and you now sound more open to discussion (rather than predisposed to judgement), I will respond to your post. (Yeah, that's a hint.) I feel the same way about our reasons for being there. But I feel differently about the current situation. I think it's a horrendously bad idea to make two wrongs a right, for example. I also feel that just because we're there for the wrong reasons doesn't mean something can't be salvaged out of this mess. After all, isn't that exactly what we would be doing if John Kerry were our preseident right now? Remember: He said he would NOT pull out our troops -- he'd send MORE. (At one point he talked about leaving after six months, but he withdrew that remark, and it hasn't been six months yet anyway.) So even if you and I had won this election, we'd still be in Iraq. And it's hard to imagine that Kerry would be doing things much differently from the way they're currently being done. You could even argue Bush's handling of Iraq has improved since the election. I agree. (Who wouldn't?) But whether or not that's what happened with Iraq is the subject of debate and opinion. I opposed the war in Iraq, but not because I thought it was an ego trip or an economic move.

ROFL!

If Gloria Steinem and Al Franken had donned disguises and driven a vehicle right at the Clinton White House and refused to stop, is there any question they would have been shot at too?

How interesting, given your first post: I didn't bother to respond to that because it was so infantile and attack-oriented. I guess outright hypocrisy crosses a line for me, and I have to say something. (chuckle) There's really nothing quite as amusing as a liberal screaming about free speech and how anyone who doesn't believe in it should be silenced. Anyway, as Phi pointed out above, you missed the mark. I was a Kerry supporter. But unlike you, I actually take the time to look at both sides of an issue, and I don't leap to conclusions about someone's motivations or overall ideology based on one or two specific opinions. You might want to give that some thought before posting again. "The strong are different from the weak, in that they think before they speak." -Mozart, "The Magic Flute"