Swank, we disagree on a lot, but you make for a fun discussion. It'd be fun to drink with you.
Swank said:
1. A draft is highly, highly unlikely.
I completely agree.
2. We do take our freedoms for granted, but this doesn't justify a draft. Supra, for instance, enjoys his job by all description and is not made to do anything for our benefit. Firefighters and policeman keep you safe within your own country, free from the despotism of fire and crime. Do you feel service in those organizations should be manditory?
No. I don't think mandatory military service should be required, except in the most dire of circumstances. Police and firefighters do have a rough job at many times, but I would still argue it's not a fair comparison of the life of a soldier. We're talking about guys that get paid 20K to dig a hole in the middle of the desert to sleep in, eat MREs for weeks on end, get four hours of sleep and no showers for god knows how long, and do it all again. Police and firefighters get a higher degree of compensation and are not asked to endure the same level of stress and hardship for the same number of hours. At any rate, if we had a drastic shortage, we would simply do the free market thing and offer a higher compensation to police and firefighters. More people would elect for military service if the compensation was higher, for that matter.
Bush is a terrible president. He's a mediocre man with very, very limited intellectual abilities.
This is entirely opinion. It's obvious that you think he is a terrible President and there is no point in my saying he is not (I think he's mediocre), other than arguing the issues individually. As for his limited intellectual abilities, he's another James Stockdale, being a very poor, nervous speaker and not able to articulate his thoughts as well as many past Presidents. He has had good moments in the past. His speech to Congress about 10 days or so after 9/11 was one of the greatest speeches ever delivered by a President and I don't recall any nervous or stuttering delivery. Anyhow, I'll concede that point, but that doesn't carry over to intellectual ability. His academic history is more impressive than his previous opponent Al Gore, who I'd bet dollars to donuts you voted for. These criticisms of his intelligence could easily be summed up like you summed up the issue of liberal military weakness--as childish liberal propaganda.
He also dodged Vietnam in a very cowardly fashion for those of you so enthused about all things martial.
Swank, you disappointed me on this one. That moveon.org/democraticunderground.com, Michael Moore garbage has been thoroughly debunked by pay records. Look, one could make a weak argument that joining the Guard is avoiding service, but Guard units routinely get called up for duty in the time of war. Then we find out Bush volunteered for missions in Vietnam.
One could blast Gore's Vietnam service. He had the audacity to say he served because if he didn't some other kid from Carthage, TN who have had to have gone. That's a joke, because he had his own little security force watching his head, due to being a Senator's son (which would happen with any Senator from any party). Because Al Gore served, another dozen kids had to go. Now, I'm not making a big issue of this. I've always felt, if you served, you served. It's relatively few that actually see the hardcore action on the frontline, but everyone plays a role. And to even make an issue of this, being that you praise Clinton so much is laughable, as his Vietnam record was disgraceful.
Somebody commented that the last democrat in office dismantled the military. Hmmm, this same military that we used to invade Iraq and Afghanistan so effectively? The army that allowed us to conquer a region in a few weeks that the Russians couldn't control in a decade of bloody combat?
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is distorted in your argument. The Soviets were whipping the shit out of Afghanistan until we aided them.
Yes, you could argue that it is Clinton's military. It also has some Bush/Reagan carryover. It's not as if because Clinton cut the military budget we melted down the M-16s and the tanks. However, there were cuts in development, which will likely hurt us down the road. An incredible amount of technology came out of the money Reagan poured into research, compared to what we saw in the 90s.
The concept that liberals are militarily weak and won't protect their country is just childish conservative propaganda.
World Trade Center 1993.
U.S.S. Cole.
Iraq in 1998.
African embassy bombings.
I'm done on this point. I can't continue to reflect on history and keep a straight face while reading your above statement.
For the last time, Iraq was not a major center of international terrorism and Hussein's government was not a terrorist booster. By all accounts it has some of the lowest concentrations of terrorists in that entire region of the world.
It did have a low concentration of terrorist compared to some other countries, but an uncooperative government, whereas the Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians, etc. are supposedly trying to aide our campaign to find these individuals. Russian President Putin said Russian intelligence had knowledge of planned Iraqi attacks against the U.S. The Czechs stand by their account of Mohammed Atta meeting in Praque with a high-ranking official in Saddam's intelligence. All the major networks reported on this story in the days right after 9/11 then it was not heard from again, because our intelligence didn't take it seriously and missed it.
So far as the outsourced terrorists, I haven't even heard of this yet, but it's no secret Iraq had a full scale weapons program for years. Did they recently? After turning the country upside down searching, conducting tens of thousands of interviews, and confiscating nearly every available government PC, we can't find a shred of evidence to credibly support the claim. Open your eyes people . . .
The outsourced nuke program was intercepted phone conversation between Khadafi and the North Koreans, where Khadafi commented that he was not going to bankrole Saddam's program, since Saddam had been captured. As for WMD, it is not hard to believe that we'll never find most of it, as it's easy to hide such things, in the grand scheme of things. There was one nuclear centrifuge that was only found because an Iraqi scientist disclosed that it was buried under a rosebush in his backyard. How much can we expect to find at that rate? In all likelihood, the WMD were moved to Syria. Am I seriously to believe that Hussein dismantled his program after there were no inspectors since 1998? Open your eyes people...
Boiling down the politics and horrors of the Balkans to a just a few thousand bodies of mixed ethnicities in holes (inaccurate statement by the way) is wrong for a lot of reasons, and it completely factors out the international and domestic political climates of the time.
The political climate of the time, versus today, is that it was in France and Germany's backyard and they were not illegally taking oil bribes. The statement of the few thousand mixed ethnicity casualties is absolutely accurate specific of the Kosovo region. I am much less familiar with the details of Bosnia.
Do yourself a favor and pick up a book on the history fo the Balkans and see how you feel.
I know the short history is that they've been fewding forever. I have a reasonable knowledge of the situation, though I'm not an expert. I have a close friend with many Serbian relatives and an aunt with a Croatian family that have informed me of their accounts of history. As for a book, I'd find it interesting, but I don't consider someone that has read more than I have to necessarily be an expert. We've got historians like Schlessenger and wannabes like Zinn offering opinions. Hell, even Michael Moore writes books, so the connection between writing and truth telling is hardly an absolute.
Additionally, we contributed to UN operations in the area and conducted a bombing campaign to depose a dictator. We didn't fly our flags under some kind of bizarre and constantly shifting 'manifest destiny' style agenda and invade the country.
There was NOT a UN mandate. We didn't have one because Russia vowed to veto it. Even today, Putin (no friend to our Iraq campaign) blasts the American left for its hypocrisy on the Iraq issue. It was authorized by NATO. I find "manifest destiny" to be an interesting choice of words, given that we're giving partial control of Iraq to the interim government on June 30th. It took five years for us to turn over control of Germany after WWII and Nazi loyalists killed 5,000 of our soldiers AFTER Germany surrendered, and we didn't even have Islamic fundamentalism to deal with. No one questions the legitimacy of our post WWII actions.
Totally different scenarios, not valid for comparison in the slightest.
Very similar. Quite valid for comparison.
Comparing Bush's foreign policy to Clinton's is like holding a candle next to a spotting light. One is far-reaching, practical, and effective; the other is old-fashioned, a bit dim, and if you take it too far out of it's prescribed element it's disappears and you're left in the dark.
I'll give you that Bush has been a domestic disappointment, though we'd disagree on what grounds. However, his foreign policy has been remarkable. His "failure" to secure a coalition centered around two alleged allies, France and Germany, which were later found to be making illegal oil purchases at give-away prices. And I'm supposed to listen to people telling me that OUR actions were all for oil? It would be funny, but when I think about the fact that their votes count the same as mine, I find it sad.
Clinton's foreign policy was not the disaster of, say, Jimmy Carter, but it was appeasement based. Clinton bent-over and lubed too many times for my tastes. Look, this is a world of 200+ nations with a variety of personal interests. If you're liked by everyone, you're probably not doing things right.