From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org]
Sent: Sunday, January
29, 2006 11:47 AM
To: 'LPCalPeace@yahoogroups.com'
Cc:
'marketliberal@yahoogroups.com'
Subject: Re: More challenges on Iraq
for Paul Ireland to duck
Nothing Paul wrote comes remotely close to
answering
- a single one of my ten yes-or-no questions
for him;
- my three-paragraph analysis of his
imaginary territorial/jurisdictional limits on the Art I Sec 8 war-making
power; or
- my two challenges that he produce quotes
supporting his claims that
All(*) Paul has done is yet again issue
blanket denials of the existence of any arguments against his position -- and
then hilariously vouch for his polemical prowess.
(*) There is only one clause in Paul's last
two sputtering outbursts that even comes close to addressing my
arguments:
PI> all he does is bring up
bogus claims that someone in Al
Queda once met someone who happened to work for the Iraqi government, which is of
course no connection as this could even be a relative. <PI
I never wrote that someone in Al Qaeda "met"
with anyone in the Iraqi government, and I challenge Paul to quote me to the
contrary. In fact, the role of Al
Qaeda in my primary argument is limited to this: "Al Qaeda WTC bomber Abdul Rahman Yasin fled to Iraq
where he lived freely and apparently drew a government salary." In
response, Paul utterly ignored the fact that Yasin found refuge in Iraq,
and feebly waved away reports that he drew a government salary as "baseless and
irrelevant".
Allen Rice wrote:
AR> It's not clear to me that Brian
ever firmly said that it therefore necessarily followed that it was a correct
and wise action to invade and occupy Iraq. If he has done so somewhere, then I
disagree with him on that. <AR
What I've said is that it was reasonable
(but not necessary) for American liberty-lovers to decide to liberate Iraq based
on the conjunction of
-
a self-defense argument made from the
conjunction of
-
Saddam's admitted nuclear
ambitions,
-
Saddam's hatred for America (regardless
of whether some think Saddam's hatred justified), and
-
Saddam's support for terrorists that
have targeted American civilians;
- Saddam's record of aggression, in which
he
- killed over a million people,
- invaded one neighbor,
- annexed another by force,
- fired ballistic missiles at two more,
- defied UN nuclear disarmament mandates that Iraq was bound to obey as a 1945 UN Charter
signatory,
- used chemical WMDs in a war of
aggression, and
- used chemical WMDs in genocidal attacks
on its own citizens;
and
the existence proofs we had in Kurdistan
and Afghanistan that the U.S. military could depose tyranny in the Islamic
world and replace it with reasonably stable self-determination.
Paul doesn't dare admit a reasonable
liberty-lover could disagree with him, because then his absolutist worldview
would start to crumble. His histrionic insistence on his unquestionable
correctness -- and on the "dishonesty" of anyone who disagrees with the
"proofs" he offers -- suggests the extent to which his psyche depends on not
admitting to himself any doubts about his absolutist
worldview.
Brian Holtz