Iraq was a good place to start. We'll get to all of them and make the world a better place, eventually, I hope.
I hope so too, but at the rate we're going, I'm highly skeptical. We can't simply fly into every country whose leadership we disapprove of, with guns blazing. It's illegal to usurp a nation's sovereign rights in that way. To depose tyrannical leaders the world over, we need to have U.N. support. And the quickest to get that support is by accusing the despot of forfeiting his sovereign rights by committing crimes against humanity, which as I stated earlier, is not something we are eager to do. Until we are ready to step up to the plate, use the dreaded "g-word" and pledge ourselves to fighting it anywhere it rears its ugly head, we wont have much legal authority to make the world a better place.
The mobile biological weapons laboratories weren't enough for you? Exactly how many smoking guns do you need?
It's not really a matter of more smoking guns, it's a matter of guns that are actually smoking. Not guns that are cold, cleaned, unloaded, and wiped down.
What? That was the fault of France and England, who were sworn as members of the League of Nations to prevent Germany from rearming. Poor Poland trusted its allies, but realized the betrayal when the Blitzkrieg finally happened. It was because of years of inaction by Western Europe that "half of Europe", as you say, was conquered by the Nazis.
I won't touch on this much except to say that Olorin makes a good point in another post about America's significant role in gutting the League of Nations before it ever really got off the ground. Wilson, of course, was a big supporter. Congress was not.
We have the nasty habit of fixing things. Period.
Just like we fixed things in Chile, Panama, and South Vietnam. But seriously, we do have a nasty habit of fixing things. Especially things we broke the first time we took a shot at them.
And it worked, and was justified because Communism was a greater threat to the world.
Are you saying that the ends justified the means? That the puppet dictators that we propped up were somehow better than the puppet dictators the Soviets propped because they were our dictators?
There was no better reason than freeing an oppressed people, destroying a malignant dictator, getting rid of the rape rooms, ending the massacring, and eliminating torture chambers ex-patriate Iraqis talked about all the time for years.
Exactly. It's too bad those weren't our reasons for going, just nice benefits.
Besides, the justification was that it broke the UN Resolutions, not that it possessed weapons of mass destruction. It did indeed break all 16 Resolutions, which were signed under Chapter V of the UN Charter, which indicate military action to enforce them. Everything's perfectly legal, and justified.
The official justification was the breaking of U.N. resolutions, although because we never waited for the U.N. (who's resolutions were broken) to give us the all clear, everything was not perfectly legal and justified.
The real reason for our going to war was to boost the popularity of a President, judicially appointed to office without a plurality in a time of economic down-turn, by 25 points. In December of 2000 I predicted we would be at war (probably, but not necessarily with Iraq) within nine months of the 2004 election. While the war may have come a little sooner than expected, it was not at all unexpected.
-Phil.
