[Torin]

I think this thread is getting a little too out of hand for me to contribute to. After reading the stuff that beerhunter says, my stomach literally aches. Obviously my mindset and how I feel this country should be run differs so far from the right that to contrast it is to compare day and night.

First, we've got Lothar talking about "a government of the people and by the people(freedom)", where in the current state of things, and the arguments he's already posted about leaders doing what they think is right irregardless of how the (uninformed, etc.) populace feel about, totally contradict themselves. The USA is the "land of the free", yes, and unless we're actually expanding our land to encompass the rest of the world, we have no reason to force feed the same ideas onto other soverign nations. If this was really a government of the people and by the people, then how is it that the government is doing so much that the people object to and feel is wrong? Sure, we've got the far right who think war in any form is a good thing, and going out with "the sword" to spread freedom and justice is right, but then we've got everyone to the left of that... even including people right of the center that feel that this war is wrong. If this was really a representative government, wouldn't we have more than such a small percentage of people (mainly the actual members of the military and the far right) thinking it's the best thing to do?

What I find funny is that the more the war goes on, the more the soldiers are actually disagreeing and blantantly disobeying orders to continue the war in Iraq, if that's what you want to call it. This forced reconstruction is ripping up the lives of nearly the entire country just so we can put into place a system we think is best for another soverign nation. This is their land, this is their oil, this is their people, these are their cities, but WE are choosing how they should live, they should build, they should work. I don't think that's right at all. And you know, the general public wouldn't think all of this is so wrong if GWB went into Iraq in the first place saying we were going to fix the situation, to right the wrongs of the past, and to make good on our mistakes. But no, he uses the war on terror as a scapegoat, and goes in to enforce his agenda without the public knowing a thing about it. I bet if the Iraqi public knew that's why we were going in, and this occupation wasn't just the end result of forced weapons inspections because we didn't believe the UN's task force knew what they were doing, that we wouldn't have so much insurgence in the first place.

I too see no wrong in the spreading of freedom and repetitive government IF they (other soverign nations) willing choose to go that route on their own. I do however see everything wrong with force feeding these ideals onto them, and making them be a model after us. These people have lived under tyranny (a lot of them their entire lives), you can't just go in and totally rip the system apart from the ground up, and expect it to work. The reconstruction of Iraq is something that needed international planning, from A-Z, and not this fly-by-night do as we go crap that's going on now. We should have had a plan for everything from the beginning, but sadly going into Iraq in the first place was not to force reconstruction at all, so this is more or less doomed to either fail, or be an eteranally ongoing process. I totally disagree with "requiring the sword" to make people follow OUR IDEAS of how a government should be run. And what's going to happen when we go into North Korea and try to do the same thing and they unleash nuclear weapons on us? That's gonna be quite lovely, and all you far-right military extremists will get to share in the wealth of birth defects and absolute ruin that is left of our country. And who are we going to blame? It sure isn't going to be me.

Back to beerhunter.... democracies don't practice wars of aggression or fundamentalism? What do you think the civil war was? Or does that one not count because we did it to each other? You don't think this force feeding of democracy in the middle east is any way fundamental? Just because our basic principles aren't in line with those of say Islamic beliefs, doesn't mean we aren't being fundamentalistic in our foreign policy. If anything, one could say that our basic ideas of freedom and justice are the very things we're going to war over, and in that case this is a war of fundamentalism. Maybe you need to go look fundamentalism up in the dictionairy. Democratic societies don't practice slavery either? Hahaha, yeah, you seriously need a history lesson. The only thing our democratic society hasn't practiced, is genocide. And I totally disagree that it is our duty to enforce this on other people. Maybe my history is a little rusty, but I don't remember the founding fathers saying anything about spread this sense of freedom and justice to the entire world. That's why it's our land of the free. They created a country, a society, a government based on these ideas of freedom and justice so we could live in peace, not us and any parts of the world we felt it necessary to spread our ideas upon.

This forced fed democracy crap is just as bad as the forced fed spiritulism/religion as it is in North Korea. There is little different from us imposing "freedom and justice in the form of democracy" on the Middle East than there is the Middle East imposing their strict and literal Islamic beliefs on us. I would venture to say there is almost no difference at all. And it makes me sick. I think it's all well and good that we (the population of the US and those who voluntarily come here) enjoy our freedom and justice, but it is definitely not our duty to force it on other people, and in that I will always disagree with Lothar and beerhunter.

And to reference all of this "in the interest of their people" makes me want to throw up. Yeah, I'm sure it was really in the interest of their people, that's why they stood by and did nothing on their own. It's not like we're going in to help the people rise up and overcome tyranny... no, we're going in to force our agenda as we see fit.

pH, if you look at the big picture, the U.S. has probably caused more civilian deaths in our night-time missiles strikes than this entire terrorist movement has. Yeah, I'm sure we try to minimize the collateral damage, but when you send a missile in to take out an entire building in order to kill 2 or 3 intended targets, I bet the civilians don't take notice that you were trying to minimize collateral damage. We may not be doing it to draw attention to our cause, but we're still killing civilians just like everyone else. It's obvious you don't agree with the fundamentals of Islam or the ideas of martys, but a lot of the people we're trying to work with in the middle east do. To them, it's honorable and the highest level of righteousness they could achieve to strap a bomb to their chest and to martyr themselves for their religion. These are religious differences to them, the politics just get in the way. To us, this is politics, to them, this is right and wrong.

Obviously I disagree with our foreign policy, but I don't think it's our job to go out and fix the rest of the world. If there was some global unification and agreement on it, then it would be about humanity, but as it stands, it's about us being world police because our leader says it's right. This isn't about terror right now, it's about us doing what we think is right, the rest of the world be damned. I'm more inclined to let the ideas of Survival of the Fittest take over, and for the Middle East to weed itself out. If eventually they destroy each other, then so be it... this is the byproduct of religious extremism. As we can never hope to get religion as a factor out of this equation, we really can't hope to solve their problems. Our country has such a huge deficit that I don't feel we're in any place to be spending the kind of money like we are in Iraq. Not to mention, if the situation in Iraq ever is concluded, are we going to move onto to another country and spend a few more hundred billion fixing their problems? No wonder my health insurance is goign up, and I can't count on society security to be there when I'm older... because we're spending all this money worrying about other countries and their problems, and seem to totally be ignoring the future of our own people. I think there is a fine line between spending our excess effort and resources making the world a better place, and spending what we would normally spend on our own people and instead on the rest of the world. I believe GWB and his administration have crossed that line distinctly, and unless something changes, I won't be able to live out the course of my life as I should in our society, because we ended up spending too many hundreds of billions on other countries, and not enough on our own. And that's why I resent the way the government is spending my tax dollars.