From: "Paul" <ptireland@...> 
Date: Sun Jan 29, 2006  6:50 pm 
Subject: Re: A little moderation, please 

I'll be the first to admit Saddam was a murderer and a tyrant, and he
was an aggressor. But he wasn't our tyrant, our aggressor, or our bad
guy. He wasn't our problem to deal with. He was a problem America
created, but not one for us to deal with. Brian has said that the war
in Iraq is lawful, and that it even libertarian.

Unless Brian can prove that land inside of America was bombed by Iraq,
or that they sunk an American ship, his position is untenable.




--- In LPCalPeace@yahoogroups.com, "Allen Rice" <amrcheck@y...> wrote:
>
> Actually, crack is not my drug of choice, Paul. I tend more toward
> caffeine and alchohol. Though there was a period in my dissolute
> youth...
>
> Demonstrated by your response to me is the flaw in your arguing
> style. Adamant insistence upon the rightness of one's own position
> and the wrongness of the other fellow's is not the same as argument
> (pace another famous Monty Python routine.)
>
> Brian has spoken for himself more than adequately elsewhere. My
> sense of what he has said is that the situation was not quite so
> black and white as you would like to have it. Saddam was certainly
> a bad guy. Wouldn't YOU agree that his attacks on Iran (9/22/80)
> and Kuwait (8/22/90), along with his SCUD missile attacks on Israel
> (1/18/91) were aggressions that would take him out from under the
> protective umbrella of the Non-Aggression Principle? Wouldn't YOU
> agree that Saddam was a proven butcher (Dujail, 1982) and gasser
> (3/16/88, 8/4/89) of his own people? Do you recall that Saddam did
> seem to pose a genuine threat with WMD just prior to the invasion
> (by his _own claim_. In hindsight probably as a bluff to keep Iran,
> and the US, at a distance).
>
> I hope you do, because you can find all this in a 15 minute Internet
> search, as I just did.
>
> 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.
>
> Regards,
> Allen Rice