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Originally Posted by marichiko
Feel, free, UG. Borrow away. Your response to my points about Vietnam was that you got to go play your bagpipes at The Wall. That's nice. So, all those men died so you could go get your ego gratified at their national memorial?
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Dear, dear, dear, Marichiko. How monomaniacally unwilling you are to be fair. Everyone but you knows that is BS. Perhaps you should take up cultivating roses instead of trying to take me on, for you are palpably defeated this day, and your carryings-on are in vain.
Frothings from you aside, that's just my estimation of how much time and experience it would take to play the pipes well enough to do a good public performance. Most playing of the great Highland bagpipe out of doors is necessarily rather public anyway; there's no way to play the things softly, unless you count stationing the piper on one hilltop and his audience on the next one over.
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Frankly, if the people of any given nation don't have the desire or will to rid themselves of dictators and tyrants, why should we spill our blood on their behalf? Let them reap their just reward as a nation and as a people. They'll figure it out - or not.
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True enough --
if that were the case with the Kurds and the Shi'ites. Did not the both of them rise in revolt against Saddam? You don't revolt if you aren't oppressed, tyrannized, and generally living in a hell, which is exactly the situation when you're living under a dictator whose rise to power partook more of the nature of a mafioso than a U.S. President. I'd say they've got the desire and the will. Do you see Iraq changing course because the Rump Saddamites are leaving bent and blasted car parts all over? No you don't. Did not reporters before the war advise us that Iraqis
from Baghdad, when the government minders weren't around, were privately telling them, and I quote, "If the Americans don't come, I'm going to kill myself." They were done with Saddam. True, they might have been done with Saddam eleven years before had we not been afraid of losing the Coalition and aided the rebellions to finish the job then, as the people who reckon Soldier of Fortune was right about it advocated, but in the end the tyrant is still fallen -- as much of his own misunderstandings of what he was doing and having done as anything we might accomplish in our campaign.
I shall assume that an
unjust recompense for Iraq's travails as a nation would be the return of a Ba'athist dictatorship.
Bored, not going to answer further and better things to do with your time? I'm glad I've more honesty than to use such childish and transparent phrases to conceal an acknowledgement of defeat on the merits of the matter. I know the sound of a defeated America-should-lose-this-because-I-don't-want-liberated-foreigners-no-matter-how-small-the-cost, and you're making that sound.
But there are other things in this. Clearly there is so enormous a chasm between Marichiko's worldview and mine that neither of us can even reliably perceive the other's important core values, let alone understand or appreciate them. Sure, not taking casualties is preferable to taking casualties -- but that is not an option in a general war, and this one is far more general than bombing targets in Kosovo. We have no known enemies who are too incompetent to blood some of us and kill others. The measure of the worthiness of America's cause is not to be found in our soldiers not getting hurt.