Jon Gabriel wrote:
...
> > Like it or not, if your policies make some people
> >angry enough to kill themselves to show their displeasure,
> >you need to rethink your policies. But this is not a very
> >popular thing to say, and the Left does have some political
> >sense.
>
> How about killing innocents? Should we therefore assume from your statement
> that you agree with the leftist belief that the mass slaughter of innocent
> civilians is an appropriate and justifiable response when someone gets
> "angry" for political reasons? To put it another way, do you believe that
> on 9/11, civilian New Yorkers deserved to die because they happened to be
> Americans?
No straw men, please. I would go as far as to say that most
COMBATANTS killed in wars did not deserve to die.
> I notice that you haven't responded to my post about body counts. I'd
> really appreciate an answer to the above questions, even if you're not going
> to respond to that one.
Sorry. Maybe I missed it. Here is a quote from CNN, from
http://us.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/04/17/sprj.irq.casualties/
"The U.S. estimated more than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers died in the
1991 Gulf War, but human rights groups claimed much higher numbers."
Given that most were conscripts, this should count as equivalent
to a sizeable civilian body count. (Or were there rules for your
proposed count-off? What were they?)
> Bill Maher's infamous statement "...the terrorists were not cowards..." has
> been applauded by the left: In my not-so-humble opinion, they most
> certainly were. Honorable, brave men would have attacked military targets
> and not civilians who couldn't fight back.
Got me. It seems that different people fight by different
rules. I don't see any suicide attack as the work of a coward.
Yes, killing civilians is not generally seen as honorable. But
most militaries accept that some civilian casualties are inevitable
in an attack. Al Quaida would probably argue that the World Trade
Center was a military target in an economic war. That's a bit
of a stretch, but all that's needed is that the terrorists
believed it.
> > I would like for the US to really be a champion of
> >human rights THROUGHOUT the world, not just when and where
> >it was politically convenient.
> Why should everything be our responsibility? We play 'world policeman'
> often enough that it gets tiresome after a while. I notice that you're not
> condemning the eastern and western European countries who fail to take on
> that role. Why not? Why do we always have to altruistically risk American
> lives because, often, much of the rest of the world can't be bothered?
What I'm saying is that it looks bad for the US to pick
and choose. We are in a good position to champion human rights,
resorting to military action if needed. But we have to be clearly
impartial about it. I imagine that we could enlist most of NATO
and so on in this cause, IF we stopped trying to run the whole
show.
---David
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