Re: [Gnu-arch-users] [OT] facism gaining ground in US

[Pierce T . Wetter III]

On Jul 20, 2004, at 11:17 AM, Roman Zippel wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Tue, 20 Jul 2004, Pierce T.Wetter III wrote:
>
> > > Why was
> > > the US so interested to invade Iraq again?
> >
> >    I don't know if I can articulate it very well, but it was 
> > basically a
> > sense
> > that we needed to protect our flank in the war on terror. Does that
> > make sense
> > or do I need to go into more detail?
>
> It doesn't make sense, because there is and never was any proof that
> Saddam was a real threat to the US or that there were any connections 
> to
> terrorism.

  Ok, so some definitions here:

  Al-Queda: A terrorist organization.
  Al-Anslam: Another terrorist organization.
  Terrorism: A global problem, carried out by a number of organizations.

  Al-Queda is a subset of terrorism the superset.

 There was/is lots of proof that Saddam had connections to _terrorism_ 
he'd
sponsor suicide bombings, he put out press releases about supporting 
terrorism, he
was harboring some known terrorists.

 There wasn't any proof that Saddam had connections to Al-Queda and
9/11. Bush actually said this on numerous occasions.

 Grinding my media ax, the media likes to say:

  Bush said we went into Iraq because of Saddam's connections to 
terrorism.
  XXXX says there is no connection to Saddan and Al-Queda.

 There's a subtle logical fallacy there, because you're comparing what
Bush said on terrorism, to a statement on Al-Queda.

  Not all fruit have seeds.
  Apples have seeds.

  Its a little more obvious if you change XXXX to Bush above:

  Bush said we went into Iraq because of Saddam's connections to 
terrorism.
  Bush says there is no connection to Iraq and Al-Queda.

  The error is in the juxtaposition of the superset with the subset.

  So there were connections to terrorism, but that wasn't the point
of my flank remark. By that I meant to say that we needed to finish
the last war before we stared a new one. Now does that make a certain
amount of sense?

> The US government has here the choice between being complete
> liars or completely incompetent.
> This discussion makes no sense and will get nowhere,
> if you don't even try
> to look into the economic interests of the US. It's amazing how you 
> manage
> to avoid this topic.

 Oh, was I avoiding it? OK. The US has an economic interest in stable 
oil prices, as
does the rest of the entire world. Randomly fluctuating energy prices 
would
have a severely depressing effect on the world economy. The US and all 
the other
developed countries spend a certain amount of their foreign policy 
efforts on
making sure that doesn't happen.

That's not the only reason we went into Iraq though. There have been 
several occasions when this country or that country has nationalized 
their oil and we've just yawned. I think the primary reason we went 
into Iraq was because Saddam was crazy.

Pierce