[Talk] [Fwd: [ECTALSR] 9/11 Flag Flying]

[Nick Simicich]

On Fri, 2006-09-01 at 17:46, liz@argate.net wrote:
> >>> To show our love of our Country and the freedom it provides.
> >>
> >> Why in honor of the anniversary of a sad and upsetting event? What's 
> >> the goal sought to be achieved by whipping up patriotic "love of 
> >> country" and tying that in with a memory that is both saddening and 
> >> angering -- to what end?...
> >>
> >> When the masses get whipped up in directionless emotions that are tied in
> >> with anger, they can be dangerous...
> 
> 
> > What is wrong with the above, if, say, the leader is right?
> 
> Which leader, what instigator, and in furtherance of what goal?  Whose 
> idea this is, and what the public support will be maneuvered or 
> manipulated toward is something I want to know first, before the great 
> unwashed begin clamoring with fervor and in anger.
> 
> Otherwise, we're not much better than the fundie Moslems going off in 
> irrationality.  Mob think is dangerous.  I'm not into encouraging 
> lynchmobs, irrational groupism, or anything that goes with such nonsense. 
> "Liberti, Igaliti, Fraterniti" etc. (There's always a patriotic or 
> religious groupist frothing going on that's the first step to manipulate 
> the masses.) Not to pick on the French Revolution, but it's a pattern that 
> too frequently repeats, one degree or another.
> 
> > I know that we are going to disagree on the Iraq war and Bush
> 
> Guess then I'm in good company with Bush's Daddy.  :-)
> 
> > But the point is that the US has declared war (or as close as we come to 
> > it these days) against terrorism
> 
> "War on Poverty"
> "War on Drugs"
> "War on Terrorism"
> 
> This is language nonsense.  "Terrorism" isn't a country.  It's one thing 
> to use "war" in a figurative sense; quite another to get people so 
> dementia that they mistake figurative language for actual war and start 
> looking around for people to kill.  There are plenty of nasty regimes 
> around the world; we haven't attacked them.  The war in Iraq has 
> absolutely nothing to do with stopping terrorism.  It's a commercial 
> oil-based issue.

I agree with you up to a point.

The difference is that while Poverty is a state of finance and mind, and
drugs are a thing, terrorists are people who have banded together.  In
the case of terrorism, you have specific organizations, and you have
countries supporting those organizations.  You can make war on, say,
pirates even though they claim no territory and you are making war on,
well, essentially piracy.  Kill the pirates, eliminate their refuges,
problem solved.  "Millions for defense, not one cent for tribute."

In many ways, your position is agreed with by the administration.  I
think they are wrong - they refuse to call the prisoners in Gitmo PoWs
because they say that will give them too much status, and I understand
their arguments but I disagree - if we declare them POWs we keep them in
prison for the duration of the war - and this is likely to be our 30
years war.  They get Red Crescent visits.   This should be a war on
terrorism where we declare that certain groups are enemy combatants -
al-Qaeda being one of them and we reserve the right to declare other
groups as allied to them.  We state that we are going to make war on
them where-ever and whenever and if you are our ally, you will not get
in our way and you will cooperate.  

But that is not what the administration has decided to do.

> But I am not into diverting the issue into politics.  Wherever reasonable 
> persons may disagree, the key is, let's remain reasonable, and thoughtful. 
> Not inane.
> 
> > The point is that different people disagree on points - for example, I 
> > believe that it is important to celebrate our patriotism on 9/11 -
> 
> What, really, does "celebrate our patriotism" mean?  Strikes me as 
> meaningless.  Sloganism, word yammering.  We're celebrating our own 
> emotions and feelings?  Gee, why?  Don't they stand on their own?  (Or is 
> this all really about something else, supra.)

For the same reason that anti-war types get together and parade and
yammer. In many ways, it is important to demonstrate that there is an
idea here, the United States, which is supported by those who live here,
and not only for what they can get from it (ask not what your country
can do for you...).

> > As a nation we should remember them, and we should aggressively defend 
> > ourselves.
> 
> Well then perhaps we should be bombing the shit out of the country the 
> terrorists came from, Saudi Arabia. 

Um, later you talk about groupthink and dementia.  I have heard this
argument several times, and it is always used as an attempt to distract
from why it was justifyable to attack Iraq.  It always comes down to
this argument:  The only thing we should be doing is reacting to 911.
International terrorism had been a problem for many years. It was not
always Muslim terrorism, but recently, that is where the terrorists have
come from.

>  Iraq was not threatening us.

Here is where we disagree.  We had a long series of failures in the
Middle East.  As a nation, it would be nice to simply say, "Um, these
are our allies and if you want to screw with them, you are screwing with
us, so back off. Up until Gulf War one, no one believed us anymore - we
pulled out of Lebanon after a couple hundred casualties, we pulled out
of Somalia after a couple hundred casualties.  It was becoming clear -
the US was a paper tiger and the most you had to worry about after
sending troops to attack us was some long range bombing.

We had signed a surrender agreement with Saddam Hussein and he had been
ignoring it for years, to the point where Kerry called for an armed
attack on Iraq with troop and so forth while Clinton was president.

Now it is important to understand why we originally attacked Iraq way
back when. Iraq had attacked Kuwait, a very small, very rich country
that had a mutual defense pact with the United States and which was a UN
member.  We were obligated to come to their aid - that is what a mutual
defense pact means.  You know where I started this by saying, "It would
be nice if we were viewed as strong because a strong country needs to
fight less?"  Well, this is exactly what I mean - Saddam had
miscalculated - he had decided that he could cause enough US casualties
that we would go away. What he did not realize is that we would kill
more of our own troops with friendly fire than he was able to kill -
that the best Russian weapons systems he could build or copy might work
against Iraq but they would not be able to kill Americans.  

When we reached the point where we were about to overrun the cities, we
came to an agreement - if they basically let us stomp around the country
and prove to our (and everyone else's satisfaction) that Saddam was not
able to attack his neighbors, then he could keep his country.

Saddam, in desperation, said yes.

So, Saddam had this treaty that allowed us to look at his weapons plans
and projects.  He then purposely failed to honor this treaty - because
he decided that he didn't have to - and because Bush was out of office
and he correctly judged that Clinton would not enforce the treaty.

Had he realized that he should just honor the treaty, well, we would
have satisfied ourselves that his WMD programs were just as silly as his
army originally was, and we would have released him and that would have
been the end of it - but he didn't do that, and Clinton ended up having
to bomb him because his ignorance of the agreement obligations were so
bad.

So we started looking really stupid, remember?  With the oil for food
stupidity, it was clear to anyone who looked at the situation that
Saddam was busily buying off European countries and so forth and simply
ignoring his treaty obligations.

Saddam seemed to be a threat to the surrounding area - moreso because we
simply did not know what he was up to.  I don't think that anyone
understood the differences between Sunnis and Shiite nor how the Sunni
would take the Shiite control of Iraq as a loss of true believer Muslim
territory.  If we had we might have paid more attention to the borders,
but, well, many of us have 20-20 hindsight.

The point is that we were justified in attacking simply because there
was not another way to prove that Saddam had no WMDs.  He had signed an
agreement to keep from being deposed by  Bush 1, remember?  He was in
the unique situation of not being allowed WMDs - since he had given up
that part of his sovereignty.

That is the real reason we attacked - would have been nice to find some
- for those people who do not understand that in the military world you
react to threats and you do not wait for action.  (This includes Bush. I
believe that the stupidest thing he did as president was to agree that
it was important that we find WMDs. He should have been explaining that
from day one - but, well, he might not be smart enough to. This is too
bad.  But in many ways, it is more important that the president be a
patriot than smart.)

> > I don't think that there is a chance that they (fundie Muslims) will 
> > love us.
> 
> No, because they're already too dementia and whipped up with their own 
> irrational, patriotic and religious fervors.  A perfect example of why we 
> don't want people to turn off their brains and imitate this sort of thing.

The point is that they want to kill us.  How do you proceed?  I think
that it is reasonable to say, "If there is a single plane that is
brought down by a Muslim fundamentalist, we will turn Mecca into
radioactive glass during the next Hajj. This probably won't stop the
terrorists. Now this is interesting, because it is a tradition that if
you die during the Hajj you go straight to heaven.  So the entire Muslim
world would go to Saudi Arabia during the next Hajj in the hope of being
bombed into radioactive glass. By then we would have calmed down and
they would riot and kill each other out of frustration at being alive.
:-)

> > Being a patriot is its own point.
> 
> I don't think so.  I'm not into groupism and us-them, me-you bigotry for 
> its own sake.

Nope - but there are lots of people who would want to kill you because
they have decided that you are in a group.

However, you have a point, and I have a point.  What say I put a flag up
and you don't?

> > Do you think that some point will be served by shoving our heads into 
> > the sand and forgetting the facts surrounding 9/11?  I don't.
> 
> I don't think we actually have the facts.

A group of fundamentalist moslems decided that it was religiously
justifiable to attack the US and commercial interests.  They did so. 

The first time they attempted this sort of attack we treated it as a
criminal act. This was singularly unsuccessful and, in hindsight,
stupid. 

The second time they attempted this attack they were successful, and
they killed thousands of innocent people and damaged expensive
commercial property.  They also put a large number of people at risk in
the recovery.

This time we treated it as an act of war and made war on the country
that was concealing the terrorists.

I think we actually have all the important facts.  We might not have all
the details. I can't imagine what details might be important.

We don't have all the details about WWII.  Maybe Hitler was justified in
killing all those Jews and French and we should have left him in power?

The point is that we know enough about WWII and enough about 911. If you
don't think we know all the details, give me an example of a detail or a
fact that would change the situation as we might imagine it.  Don't
quote those idiots who claim that the planes were empty or such - facts
that could be - that do not contradict those things we know - not
conspiracy theories.

-- 
"The threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real,
but as I said, it is not new. It has been with us since the end of that
war, and particularly in the last 4 years we know after Operation Desert
Fox failed to force him to reaccept them, that he has continued to build
those weapons. He has had a free hand for 4 years to reconstitute these
weapons, allowing the world, during the interval, to lose the focus we
had on weapons of mass destruction and the issue of proliferation." 
   -- John Kerry, 10/9/02