Dave2112
Level of Cherry Feather
- Joined
- Apr 17, 2001
- Messages
- 10,293
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I've been sitting here mulling this over for awhile now, and all it's done is frustrate me more. I never thought I'd see the day when we as a community were at each other's throats so. I even once wrote what I thought at the time would be my only comment on the topic of war, but as we've all found out...things like this have a way of not resting.
What's been eating at me isn't the justification or the need to turn others to my way of thinking. This is NEVER going to happen. There are strongly held opposing opinions, and there is no way, sociologically speaking, that the twain shall join. Yet we feel a need to keep trying, drudging up every little factoid, every detail of operations thirty years old, every imagined debt, every unproven fault.
Feeling an uncustomary and decidedly undiplomatic rant coming on....must fight urge...oh, screw it...
Can we please GROW THE F**K UP?!?!?!?
Whew, that feels better...
When this whole thing started, I was totally against any move to invade Iraq. None of the arguments made sense to me, not enough to invade anyway. I agreed that Iraq had been given more than enough time to comply with a referendum that all parties had agreed on. However, I felt that world agreement on a course of action was of more societal value than the possible repercussions. I believed that Saddam Hussien was a potential global threat not seen since Hitler. But, I felt that full-scale war wasn't neccessary to remove him from power. I knew that he didn't plan out 9/11 personally, but feel strongly that his criminal orginization (sorry...government) was involved at least on a financial level. But, I was praying that people didn't profane the memory and tragedy of 9/11 by using is as the sole rallying point for a war with a soveriegn nation.
There were a lot of conflicting emotions, until one thing changed my mind. There was one outcome of this war that outweighed everything else, one thing that forced me to truly put my beliefs to the test to support such violence...
...the liberation of the citizens of Iraq.
Personally, I don't give a shit how it started. I couldn't care less what happened sixty friggin' years ago, who said what, who was where, who's getting money from this, who's doing this for that reason...JESUS it gets old! As a civilized society, we have a responsibility to groups of people who still suffer oppression. I don't even care if that was or wasn't an initial reason for going in, it's an acceptable final outcome to me. I can justify that by my set of values. I don't care if others can or will, and I refuse to try to change them. It's not important.
This has been a bitch-slap fight across the Big Pond that is personally really starting to piss me off. Perhaps being a dual-citizen has given me perspectives from both sides, I don't know. But I do know that I just can't get it. I am a born European with a proud family history and heritage. When things as trivial as the types of foods a culture eats become an arguing point or the butt of a joke, I take it as personal insult. I am also an American citizen, have been for the greater part of my life, and consider the USA my home and country first. When people who've never been here start slamming the way we live, even though half of our culture isn't exactly eschewed by modern Europe, I also take it as a personal slap in the face.
We call ourselves civilized, yet we feel a need to post every arguement and counter-arguement without thought of seeing another point of view. And we do all of this while people are dying. And I'm not just talking about the military personnel. I'm talking about the aforementioned Iraqi citizens (subjects?). I know I'm going to get a lot of responses along the lines of "That's not why the US went into Iraq, it was because...blah,blah,blah...". If you feel a need to express this, if it makes you feel more self-important, all-knowledgeable and bloated, go right ahead. I can't stop anybody from expressing thier opinion. My point is that these people will no longer be under the rule of a man who is nothing short of insane.
You can puff up all the rumours, conjecture and past actions until you're blue in the face, but you can't ignore the facts that are right in front of your eyes. Hundreds of bodies have been found with bullet holes in the backs of the skulls, complete with a record, photograph and one "charge" or another. Listen to the people coming out of Iraq, or the ones who've been out for a long time. They'll tell you the truth. The truth about a dictator who forces people to have rallies for him under pain of death and torture. Not just for them, but for thier families. The truth about a regime that tortures children, young children, leaving them mangled, broken and disfigured...to get thier fathers to confess to "crimes". The truth about the psychotic leader's sons, who by comparison make him look like a minor street thug...ensuring that yet another generation will live in abject Hell.
They say the Iraqis don't want us there. Of course they are hesitant, after the lurch we left them in after the Gulf War. Something I thought we were morally wrong for doing, so don't think I see only one side to this. We should have stayed, instead of leaving the uprising citizens at the hands of a madman with a nasty army and a lot of egg on his face. I don't blame them one bit for thier initial reluctance to embrace a coalition invading thier country. But look at the images, people. Listen to the words. The safer people are starting to feel, the more they are realizing that the propaganda is untrue, that we will see this finished. Troops are being greeted by cheering throngs at times, although it IS war, and many are still just hunkering down. Who wants to walk out in the middle of a war zone? Ask the Iraqi who took several recon trips in and out of an armed hospital to help coalition forces rescue a 19-year-old American POW. He stated that regardless of where they come from, people cannot be treated the way she was being treated and he had to do something, even at risk to himself and his family. Marines risked their safety to deliver a baby to an Iraqi woman in a car outside a battlefield...whom she named "America." No, these people don't want to be rescued....they enjoy being told what to think, what to wear, who to support and when and how they are going to die. Christ.
None of you will ever know what it is like to live like that. You can grab a drink out of the fridge, sit in your own house in front of a computer that costs more than most Iraqis will make in ten years, and arbitrarily argue the fate of a nation and its people. You are free to think what thoughts you want, and have them heard by the world. We can argue back and forth about what weapons Hussien has or doesn't have. And people are being tortured. We can argue ad nauseum about who gets what after it's over, which truly makes me sick, even though it's not even over yet. And the bodies of the fallen aren't even cold in the ground. We can bring up every single little fact we want, every little self-important dicthom...and people are being subjugated.
Whatever the cause of this war, whatever the cost to international relationships, possible profit and political and social outcome...it will be worth it to me to see these people freed of tyranny. What kind of country will they have when it's over? Does it frigging matter right now? It HAS to be better than what they have...and what they don't.
I'm quite sure that these people don't care about the politics and policies being argued over and over and over and over....even though we seem to find it so utterly fascinating.
We will never agree on the political foreplay leading up to this. But I hope that as a civilized species we can agree on the bottom line that freeing a subjugated people should outweigh any other reasoning. This isn't policy, this is lives. How can we possibly not see it? Whether you're American, British, French, German, Dutch, Canadian or whatever...we have to realize that WE, as a whole, are not the bad-guys. With all of our differences in opinions and backgrounds...we're the people who don't fly airplanes into civilian buildings, we're the ones who don't gas thier own citizens, we're the ones who don't kill over religious beliefs. And we have to find a way to bring down those who do. Together. As a species.
I know that Iraq isn't the only place where people are living like this. There are ways to free them all, but never enough time. Even together, we can't do it overnight. But we have to stop pissing each other off for the fun of it, while evil succeeds. We can't stop helping just because we can't fix it all. And we can't help anyone if we don't cut the shit and grow up. We who claim to be the civilized ones, bicker like children while evil goes unchecked under our arguing noses. They depend on this for thier little cults to work. We fight each other, they fight us....eventually, they win. Hopefully, a little at a time, we can find a way to at least agree that people shouldn't have to live the way they do in Iraq. And as long as we are there through whatever chain of events brought us there...I feel justified in supporting this war.
One early dawn, a young man walking down the beach after a storm came across an old man coming the other way. The old man was picking up starfish and throwing them into the sea. When they met, the young man asked "What are you doing?" The old man replied "The storm has washed up all of these starfish, so I'm throwing them back into the sea before the sun comes up all the way and dries them up."
The young man looked down the length of the beach and saw thousands of starfish, and the sun was beginning to peak over the horizon. He started to laugh. "You old fool," he said "there are thousands of starfish on this beach, you'll never get to all of them! What you're doing just doesn't matter!"
The old man bent down and picked up a wriggling starfish, looked at it and tossed it into the sea. He smiled at the young man and said,
"It mattered to that one."
There's a lot of starfish, people.
And the sun's coming up fast.
What's been eating at me isn't the justification or the need to turn others to my way of thinking. This is NEVER going to happen. There are strongly held opposing opinions, and there is no way, sociologically speaking, that the twain shall join. Yet we feel a need to keep trying, drudging up every little factoid, every detail of operations thirty years old, every imagined debt, every unproven fault.
Feeling an uncustomary and decidedly undiplomatic rant coming on....must fight urge...oh, screw it...
Can we please GROW THE F**K UP?!?!?!?
Whew, that feels better...
When this whole thing started, I was totally against any move to invade Iraq. None of the arguments made sense to me, not enough to invade anyway. I agreed that Iraq had been given more than enough time to comply with a referendum that all parties had agreed on. However, I felt that world agreement on a course of action was of more societal value than the possible repercussions. I believed that Saddam Hussien was a potential global threat not seen since Hitler. But, I felt that full-scale war wasn't neccessary to remove him from power. I knew that he didn't plan out 9/11 personally, but feel strongly that his criminal orginization (sorry...government) was involved at least on a financial level. But, I was praying that people didn't profane the memory and tragedy of 9/11 by using is as the sole rallying point for a war with a soveriegn nation.
There were a lot of conflicting emotions, until one thing changed my mind. There was one outcome of this war that outweighed everything else, one thing that forced me to truly put my beliefs to the test to support such violence...
...the liberation of the citizens of Iraq.
Personally, I don't give a shit how it started. I couldn't care less what happened sixty friggin' years ago, who said what, who was where, who's getting money from this, who's doing this for that reason...JESUS it gets old! As a civilized society, we have a responsibility to groups of people who still suffer oppression. I don't even care if that was or wasn't an initial reason for going in, it's an acceptable final outcome to me. I can justify that by my set of values. I don't care if others can or will, and I refuse to try to change them. It's not important.
This has been a bitch-slap fight across the Big Pond that is personally really starting to piss me off. Perhaps being a dual-citizen has given me perspectives from both sides, I don't know. But I do know that I just can't get it. I am a born European with a proud family history and heritage. When things as trivial as the types of foods a culture eats become an arguing point or the butt of a joke, I take it as personal insult. I am also an American citizen, have been for the greater part of my life, and consider the USA my home and country first. When people who've never been here start slamming the way we live, even though half of our culture isn't exactly eschewed by modern Europe, I also take it as a personal slap in the face.
We call ourselves civilized, yet we feel a need to post every arguement and counter-arguement without thought of seeing another point of view. And we do all of this while people are dying. And I'm not just talking about the military personnel. I'm talking about the aforementioned Iraqi citizens (subjects?). I know I'm going to get a lot of responses along the lines of "That's not why the US went into Iraq, it was because...blah,blah,blah...". If you feel a need to express this, if it makes you feel more self-important, all-knowledgeable and bloated, go right ahead. I can't stop anybody from expressing thier opinion. My point is that these people will no longer be under the rule of a man who is nothing short of insane.
You can puff up all the rumours, conjecture and past actions until you're blue in the face, but you can't ignore the facts that are right in front of your eyes. Hundreds of bodies have been found with bullet holes in the backs of the skulls, complete with a record, photograph and one "charge" or another. Listen to the people coming out of Iraq, or the ones who've been out for a long time. They'll tell you the truth. The truth about a dictator who forces people to have rallies for him under pain of death and torture. Not just for them, but for thier families. The truth about a regime that tortures children, young children, leaving them mangled, broken and disfigured...to get thier fathers to confess to "crimes". The truth about the psychotic leader's sons, who by comparison make him look like a minor street thug...ensuring that yet another generation will live in abject Hell.
They say the Iraqis don't want us there. Of course they are hesitant, after the lurch we left them in after the Gulf War. Something I thought we were morally wrong for doing, so don't think I see only one side to this. We should have stayed, instead of leaving the uprising citizens at the hands of a madman with a nasty army and a lot of egg on his face. I don't blame them one bit for thier initial reluctance to embrace a coalition invading thier country. But look at the images, people. Listen to the words. The safer people are starting to feel, the more they are realizing that the propaganda is untrue, that we will see this finished. Troops are being greeted by cheering throngs at times, although it IS war, and many are still just hunkering down. Who wants to walk out in the middle of a war zone? Ask the Iraqi who took several recon trips in and out of an armed hospital to help coalition forces rescue a 19-year-old American POW. He stated that regardless of where they come from, people cannot be treated the way she was being treated and he had to do something, even at risk to himself and his family. Marines risked their safety to deliver a baby to an Iraqi woman in a car outside a battlefield...whom she named "America." No, these people don't want to be rescued....they enjoy being told what to think, what to wear, who to support and when and how they are going to die. Christ.
None of you will ever know what it is like to live like that. You can grab a drink out of the fridge, sit in your own house in front of a computer that costs more than most Iraqis will make in ten years, and arbitrarily argue the fate of a nation and its people. You are free to think what thoughts you want, and have them heard by the world. We can argue back and forth about what weapons Hussien has or doesn't have. And people are being tortured. We can argue ad nauseum about who gets what after it's over, which truly makes me sick, even though it's not even over yet. And the bodies of the fallen aren't even cold in the ground. We can bring up every single little fact we want, every little self-important dicthom...and people are being subjugated.
Whatever the cause of this war, whatever the cost to international relationships, possible profit and political and social outcome...it will be worth it to me to see these people freed of tyranny. What kind of country will they have when it's over? Does it frigging matter right now? It HAS to be better than what they have...and what they don't.
I'm quite sure that these people don't care about the politics and policies being argued over and over and over and over....even though we seem to find it so utterly fascinating.
We will never agree on the political foreplay leading up to this. But I hope that as a civilized species we can agree on the bottom line that freeing a subjugated people should outweigh any other reasoning. This isn't policy, this is lives. How can we possibly not see it? Whether you're American, British, French, German, Dutch, Canadian or whatever...we have to realize that WE, as a whole, are not the bad-guys. With all of our differences in opinions and backgrounds...we're the people who don't fly airplanes into civilian buildings, we're the ones who don't gas thier own citizens, we're the ones who don't kill over religious beliefs. And we have to find a way to bring down those who do. Together. As a species.
I know that Iraq isn't the only place where people are living like this. There are ways to free them all, but never enough time. Even together, we can't do it overnight. But we have to stop pissing each other off for the fun of it, while evil succeeds. We can't stop helping just because we can't fix it all. And we can't help anyone if we don't cut the shit and grow up. We who claim to be the civilized ones, bicker like children while evil goes unchecked under our arguing noses. They depend on this for thier little cults to work. We fight each other, they fight us....eventually, they win. Hopefully, a little at a time, we can find a way to at least agree that people shouldn't have to live the way they do in Iraq. And as long as we are there through whatever chain of events brought us there...I feel justified in supporting this war.
One early dawn, a young man walking down the beach after a storm came across an old man coming the other way. The old man was picking up starfish and throwing them into the sea. When they met, the young man asked "What are you doing?" The old man replied "The storm has washed up all of these starfish, so I'm throwing them back into the sea before the sun comes up all the way and dries them up."
The young man looked down the length of the beach and saw thousands of starfish, and the sun was beginning to peak over the horizon. He started to laugh. "You old fool," he said "there are thousands of starfish on this beach, you'll never get to all of them! What you're doing just doesn't matter!"
The old man bent down and picked up a wriggling starfish, looked at it and tossed it into the sea. He smiled at the young man and said,
"It mattered to that one."
There's a lot of starfish, people.
And the sun's coming up fast.
