Poor Pat Tillman :((

[Gaius_Marius]

As you all know Pat Tillman, a football player from the Arizona Cardinals, was killed in Afghanistan yesterday. The guy walked away from millions of dollars to fight for our way of life. Hmmmm. This is very mind boggling indeed. I believe he thought that the war would be a cakewalk. He probably thought "ah I'll just go to Afghanistan, serve and come back with a couple of purple hearts and be named a hero. Yes he is a hero. A hero for an UNJUST cause. His life was wasted along with the other 600 poor American Soldiers who are serving the interests of greedy businessmen ie. Cheney, Halliburton, jews. Its such a shame that a country as great as the United States of America is now guided by money and religious fanaticism. What happened to the America I knew. The America of principle and character. That has long disappeared. WE have become a country of money worshippers. What A SHAME! Pat Tillman wasted his life.


Georgie boy believes he's on a mission from God to extinguish the terrorists. Well.....hmmmm Don't the terrorists believe the exact same thing in terms of God being on their side. WHAT AN IDIOT!

[-deleted129]

Pat Tillman was there before,
Lil Bush is there now
and if this b*llsh*t goes on, the whole USA will be there: The Endzone


Wussy
(who is to stupid to understand politics, Eurrh .... I think )


PS
If I may quote Rage Against The Machine
"The land of the free? Whoever told you that is your enemy"
&
"Europe ain't my rope to swing on"

I'am from The Netherlands, Europe.
It's nice living here but it sure as hell ain't paradise, gladly we got Stratego if we want to play with Generals, Captains and Bombs.
_________________
S t r a t e g o - C l u b - N a p o l e o n

[faithless]

HI -, Luc!

Not to forget the thousands of Iraqi civilians died in the last year.





Faithless

[apollo]

So - and Faithless, how would you guys have handled the situation? We were attacked on 9-11 as everyone knows, so what would you have done about it? Nothing? Thats why we're in Afghanistan, hunting for Al-Quida(spelling). As far as Iraq goes, the UN gave the guy 17 resolutions and over 4 years to comply and he refused. He murdered many many more thousands of his own people with nerve gas as well as hundreds of thousands of Iranians. Ask yourself one question. Is the world a safer and better place with Hussein out of power? Sure we've lost many good men to this war, but remember one thing, each one CHOSE to be in Our army unlike the war in Vietnam. Terrorists only know one thing and that's violence, you can not fight them by turning the other cheek and complying to their demands. Spain has just shown the world that ,"hey you attacked us and killed our civilians, so we're gonna do what you want and pull our troops out of Iraq." That's a big mistake. -, do you really believe that if we pulled our troops out of Iraq tomorrow, that we would safe from Al-Quida and other terrorists groups in the future? I would really like to hear yall's answer as to how you would have handled the situation, especially you -, as you live here in the USA. Just my thoughts.

Apollo

[Gaius_Marius]

In the nineties America emerged as the lone superpower in the world. As a superpower there are certain duties that need to be done. The most important duty is to possess an IMPARTIAL foreign policy. We obviously have not fuliflled this duty. Ask yourself "is Al-Qaeda destroyed?" "is Bin Laden captured?". The answer is a big fat NO! We never asked ourselves why the Arabs attacked us. We never asked ourselves could it be our overwhelming support of Israel that caused the WTC to go down. Instead the goverment injected us with patriotic propoganda calling Arabs terrorists. Well guess what? On the other side of the world WE ARE VIEWED AS TERRORISTS! The way I would have handled it was to do what a superpower should do. Act as a moderator and support neither Jews or Muslims. I would not have let money and greed dicate to me. I would have ignored the powerful Jews in my government. Going to Afghanistan has not beared any fruit. Our government has sent troops to line their own greedy pockets. Our government could careless about what will happen to the future generations of Americans. I mean look around you. Outsourcing of jobs, massive immigration, budget cuts for much needed public services. If our goverment doesn't give a damn about domestic issues do u think they will care about how future generations will deal with foreign problems. NO, NO ,NO! According to the current "cowboys" in power it doesn't matter how many countries we destroy, how many soldiers die, how sluggish our economy is, and how many countries in Europe and others we anger. All that matters is making money and more money.

Now I'm sorry to say that our invasion of Iraq is the biggest waste of human life and more importantly as our goverment would say, MONEY. Apollo, you say that the U.N gave Saddam 17 resolutions and 4 years to comply. My answer to that is SO WHAT? Iraq had no WMD's and they posed absolutely no threat to world peace. Yes, Saddam was a monster and yes he killed many of his own people, SO WHAT? Apollo you've seen how backward and ignorant these Iraqis are. Do you think these people understand democracy? Also western style democracy! For a backward people you need a ruthless dicatator to bring peace and stability to a country. These people adhere to the notion that might is right. For Iraqis Saddam was their savior. Let's see under Saddam at least Iraqis had jobs and education. There were good times for Iraqis. So what if they were ruled by Saddam. The people seemed to not care that he was in power. Do you really think that we went to Iraq to bring democracy? Hell no! Our monkey brained president did it to take the revenge of his daddy. Also like I said it was for money and greed! Is Iraq better since we invaded it? Is their stability? Do the people welcome us with open arms? Does the world view us as being just and principled? The answer to all is NO! On the contrary, Will there be civil war in Iraq when we pull out? Will world opinion for America spiral downward once we realize our ultimate folly and pull out of Iraq? The answer is YES, YES, YES!

Apollo I'd like to ask you these questions. Now why do u think there are terrorists groups that hate the U.S so passionately? Do u think they are terrorizing the U.S because they have nothing else better to do?

I'm very sorry that 3000 people lost their lives in the WTC but you need to blame our poor foreign policy and not the muslims. They are just reacting out of helplessness. I DO LOVE this country and if speaking out against the morons in our government is unpatriotic then so be it.

-

[apollo]

-,

Alot you say, I agree with, but you still didn't answer my question. The present president didn't establish our foreign policy, he just continued it from his predecessors(both republican and democrat). Israel is surrounded by countries which hate it just because of religious differences. So I ask again, after 9/11 happened, what would you have done as president? To say this war is all about money and oil is absurd. We could have sent the Florida national guard and defeated Argentina and gotten more oil than we'll ever get out of Iraq. I am not naive enough to say that money isn't probably the motivating factor behind domestic and foreign policy practices, but in this situation I feel President Bush did the right thing, no the only thing, that he could have. As far as WMD's go, the whole world knew he had them, he used them on his own people, but when given the time he had , there's no doubt he either destroyed them or moved them to another country. Maybe Sadam wasn't a threat to us, but he was SURELY a threat to Israel and we are their ally, like it or not, and the USA will always defend their allies.

Apollo

[googoomuck]

I'm kind of in between - and Faithless positions on this.

As far as 9/11 and the war on terrorism is concerned I supported the invasion of Afganistan & the removal of the Taliban regime.

Iraq OTOH. First we were told that we had to invade to prevent Saddam from supplying Al Queada with WMD. Since it's become apparent that there were no longer any WMDs in Iraq our mission is to bring democracy to Iraq. The war seems to have been carried out with little or no planning for what to do after toppling Saddam and his regime. The looting of the Bagdad Museum for example.

Invading Iraq also deverted resources from the war against Osama Bin Laden and Al Queada in Iraq.

Remember when Saddam was our newfound friend in the Middle East?

Shaking Hands: Iraqi President Saddam Hussein greets Donald Rumsfeld, then special envoy of President Ronald Reagan, in Baghdad on December 20, 1983.
_________________
Metaforge Message Board Moderator

[Gaius_Marius]

Apollo I actually did answer your question. I just didn't state it explicitly. Bush should not have continued the old foreign policy. Rather he should have changed it. A superpower cannot take sides especially when the side they are against are the vast majority in the east. If America sides with Jews there will never be an end to this war. Why are we keeping up false pretenses with the Muslims? Since it is painfully obvious that we are against them we should then invade every single Islamic country. That seems to be the only way to win this war. Since we cannot do this we should then NOT TAKE SIDES but moderate. True, we could have invaded Argentina and harbored their goodies but there was no fake excuse to invade Argentina. Bush, well actually Cheney whose really calling the shots, used the weapons of mass destruction nonsense to invade Iraq and gain personally from this miserable war. Its all about not giving two shits about the American people.

Apollo you said America and its "allies". You mean ONE Ally. Israel is the only ally of the United States.

[-deleted103]

To clear up a few things:

There isn't and wasn't a single drop of oil in Afghanistan for anyone to exploit.
There is only one thing Afghanistan has/had that has worth anything on any world market and that's poppy fields and heroin. I have yet to hear anyone say we invaded them for their heroin.
The world, including our previous president Clinton, agreed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Nominee Kerry, in 1998, is also quoted as such. All voting members of the U.N. as late as 2002 voted that Iraq had those WPM's. This includes Russia, China, and France. The only difference is they wanted to wait awhile longer (lol) to go after Saddam.
There is currently a scandal in the U.N. involving payouts from Saddam to many members of the U.N. This includes U.N. President Kofi Annan, France, Russia and Germany to name a few. So far the committees (one U.N. committee and one U.S. committee) investigating this have concluded that Annan's son took payouts from Saddam. Those so called peace-loving countries did not want to be discovered as taking part in this scandal after the removal of Saddam, hence their desire to leave everything as is.
Iraq was the only country in the entire world with a strong military, a killing hatred for the U.S., and the wealth to carry out those killing desires eventually. No other country on earth fits that bill. N. Korea has the hate and a bomb to hit our west coast so we're told, but is poor with no natural resources and can't sustain the threat forever. Iran is rich and hates us but has not the military. The Saudi's have US as their military.
Israel blew up a previous Saddam nuclear program in 1983. Thank whatever god you worship or don't worship.
Pakistan currently has nuclear bombs and their population hated us before these wars. We now have an outpost in Afghanistan should the wrong group attain power there.
Militant fundamentalist Muslims have been bombing the U.S. consistently since 1979. They hate us no matter who our president is. Remember 1980's attacks in Iran (hostage crisis), Lebanon (200 killed and Reagan withdrew our troops), Pan Am flight over Scotland (bombed by Libya and hundreds killed), 1990's attacks at world trade center (strange how Ramzi Youssef, an Iraqi, was behind that one, hmmm....), embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, soldiers trying to feed Somalians in 1993/1994, U.S.S. Kole (17 killed in Yemen on that one I think), and of course 9/11...but there are many more I can't remember right now. Only once did we retaliate. Reagan bombed Qaddaffi from Libya after the Pan Am flight was shot down.
Is it only a strange coincidence that Qaddaffi and Libya are, as we speak, disarming their weapons and wanting to join us in peace? In fact, they let weapons inspectors in recently and large stashes of mustard gas were found in turkey farms of all places.
All polls by all pollsters have shown, minimum, 67% approval of Iraqi people, of the U.S. coming in and taking out Saddam. They want us to protect them. They just want to rule their own country while we protect them. After 6/30/04 they will get this wish. All polls show they don't want us to leave. This includes polls by normally anti-war pollsters like CNN/Time-Warner, U.S.A. Today, ABC, and CBS and also independants such as Gallop----not just the conservative-leaning Fox News.
Yes, Bush did do this because of his dad. His dad screwed up bigtime by listening to the U.N. mandate only and not taking out Saddam 13 years ago. Most of the current administration was part of that screw-up and are attempting to correct their mistake.
Yes this has been rough and will continue to be rough. Did you know that it took 6 years for the Germans and Japanise to stop killing our soldiers who were there to rebuild their nations after the war was over in World War 2? Looking at those nations now you'd have to say we did a wonderful job of rebuilding, no?
Germany and Japan both learned that Democracy is a good thing after long periods of time with authoritarian rulers. Everyone in this world deserves a chance to govern themselves and no group is too stupid to achieve this. Iraq is hopefully a building block for much of the mideast in this respect.
This whole war on terror is an attempt to avoid World War 3. The Muslim fundamentalists declared war on us 25 years ago. They teach it in their schools. Disenting opinions are quashed. They will continue to bomb us and kill us until we kill them or make them give up. They believe Jews and Christians have no right to live---no matter what else that person says or does----this is also taught at a young age (even in Saudi-Arabia and Pakistan). There are more Wahabi Muslims than ever.
The growth of the Wahabi and other Christian/Jew hating groups did not slow down in the 1990s. During the 90s the U.S. essentially led 3 wars: 1) The Bosnian/Kosovo war where we protected Albanian Muslims 2) The Somalian mini-war which was intended by Clinton to feed Muslim Somalians, and 3)The first gulf war where we were protecting Kuwait Muslims from a fellow Muslim Saddam taking over their country and threatening other Muslims (Saudi-Arabia) with continuing into their country. All this made them love us enough to kill themselves and us on 9/11.
Saddam Hussein has killed over 300,000 Muslims in his illustrious career. We captured him a few months ago. I would call that in itself disarming a weapon of mass destruction.
I personally hate Bush. He has escalated wasteful spending government programs, is for the death penalty, is a poor communicator who doesn't speak to the public and press often enough, and refuses to address our border situation in Mexico and Canada. His tax cuts were too weak and he reappointed Greenspan who botched our economy in the late 90s by lowering interest rates before Y2K when it wasn't necessary and led us to a stock bubble. He has done one thing right. He appears to care that my kids will someday have their own grandkids---he is striking first before the powers that be (or will be) have a chance to deny my kids that chance.
I wanted to vote for Steve Forbes. I ended up voting for the Libertarian candidate in 2000 to protest our whole 2-party system.
The U.S. congress could easily push through a bill to collect back our billions lost by liberating Iraq. Many top Democrats, including Kerry, said Bush is wrong for not doing this. All we'd have to do is sell all Iraqi oil and keep profits til the war debt is paid. This administration chose not to do this until the distant future when Iraq is back on it's feet. If this was a war for oil they sure did miss a golden opportunity to - on the worlds 3rd biggest supply (Iraq). Could it be they actually want to do what's best for all of us?
_________________
I have AIDS and I smell kinda funny. Let me win and I won't, like, touch you er anything.

[faithless]

Hi Ilimoinc!

I thought a long time about involving myself in this discussion again. It´s just that I can´t read so much "plain" knowledge which isn´t put into historical context and not answer to it.
You are talking about a muslim history of fighting the US. But it´s funny you don´t talk about the american part of the story. Which was the intelligence service who was training Saddam Hussein? Wasn´t it the CIA?
Who was the country giving Saddam Hussein total power by giving him the weapoms to fight Iran? A million killed. Wasn´t it the US?
Who was the country giving weapons to Iran later which made the war even longer? So that more people were killed, because the war went on and on. Wasn´t it the US?
A sad fact is that the american government didn´t care much for dead people by installing governments which are loyal or seemed to be loyal to the US foreign interests. They even uninstalled democratic elected governments when they weren´t "nice" enough. On the other hand they re-installed the Kuwaiti-leaders. Not really democrats, aren´t they?
Don´t you see you contradict yourself?
First you say:
"Iraq was the only country in the entire world with a strong military, a killing hatred for the U.S., and the wealth to carry out those killing desires eventually."
Later you say: "All polls by all pollsters have shown, minimum, 67% approval of Iraqi people, of the U.S. coming in and taking out Saddam. They want us to protect them."
Lol, I don´t know who went to Iraq to start a poll in the first place, but...anyway.
So the Iraqi hate the americans - and wanted them to come to their country to "liberate" them?
Your kind of view is very american. Why are we talking about North Korea anyway? No one talked about North Korea five years ago. Then some guy said that they are evil, and now everyone talks about this country. We seem to be more influenced than we think. A fact is that no country has more weapons of mass destruction than the US.
No country has more different and powerful A-, B- and C-weapons. And (especially after the Cold War) tell me what you want - there is a damn responsibility it has for the rest of the world.
The whole world depends from decisions made in the white house, so there is no time for playing cowboy and bandit.
It´s disgusting that the US, a country where in the 19th century more than 90% of the people were reading newspaper, a country where in the 19th century more people could read than everywhere else in the world, a country where people listened to politicians exchanging arguments for nearly ten hours sometimes, lost it´s level of education and making everything black and white. Good and evil.
You are talking about history. Well. If you mention germany and Japan and their way to democracy, please don´t forget that it was their second attempt.
Japan was an isolated country in the 19th century which was forced by US-warships to open their harbours for trade. To brake up some countries own decision to isolate itself for egoistic reasons changes the way of history and is definitely an imporrtant chapter on the historical way to Pearl Harbour.
Germany was forced to democracy in 1918. It was Woodrow Wilson who said that a cease-fire and an end of the war would depend on that. In fact, Germany is the country which is the worst example for forcing people to make a democracy who aren´t ready for it. It was a nice try, but we all know the Weimarer republic was struggling all the time till some radical called Adolf - came and took away the democracy.

Woodrow Wilson had visions. Visions the world wasn´t ready for. The United Nations for example. He also tried this, but the english and french weren´t ready for it. While he was ignoring the reality of 1918 they were more interested in signing new borderlines into a map, lying on a table in Versailles, of the middle east and Africa to get even more power - and oil of course. They weren´t interested in the people living there, their identities and their lives. This is also one of the reasons the middle east became what it is now.

Apollo asked the question what we would have done after 9-11.
Well, listen to your friends! Don´t blackmail them by saying: be with or against us". Diplomacy wasn´t never that easy. Nearly the whole world showed solidarity with the US people. You were shocked and you are still shocked. For good reason.
But, to be honest, what did Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi people have to do with that?
Ask yourself two questions: Who is dying? and: Who will benefit?


Greetings!

Faithless

[-deleted103]

Faithless, our language differences make some of the things you're saying hard to comprehend (probably my fault more than yours), except for the last paragraph which I'll answer here.
We used extreme diplomacy in the first gulf war in 1991. The entire world, including Syria of all places, was on our side. We obeyed every U.N. mandate for the war. We even convinced Israel not to strike back when Saddam repeatedly bombed its' cities. We had a chance to destroy Saddam and his military and passed on it because the U.N. would not approve. As I stated earlier, our last 3 wars (all in the 90s) had as their objective the salvation of Muslims.It's too late to get to the root of why they hate us, I wasn't around to tell my elders what they were doing wrong and nothing, NOTHING we do now will make them "forgive" whatever angered them long long ago about us, they must simply be defeated. By the way, the reason North Korea is suddenly a problem is because, once again, our leaders chose diplomacy in dealing with them in 1994. Clinton and Kim Jon IL (sp?) signed a peace agreement that year which basically was a gentlemens agreement that N. Korea drop its nuclear program. But agreements mean nothing to dictators. Dictators don't have a system of checks and balances in their governments. Dictators know only power and Kim Jon IL did not abandon his nuclear program. He's using it to bribe the U.S. and China for more aid to his government (yes, we foolishly aid his economy with cash every year).
As long as one guy can push a button and destroy parts of the world dictators who wish ill on us and have the power to do so must be destroyed. If Bush chose to bomb Canada (an innocent neighbor) right now, there are systems in place here that would prevent him from doing it. That's what a democracy with a system of checks and balances will do for a country, and that's what the Iraqi's want as well. Those polls are accurate, they really do want us there. The media institutions I listed above for the most part hate each other (except for Gallop). I'll add this one as well. The BBC (from which spawned Al Jazeera) also had similar findings in it's poll. Al Jazeera wouldn't dare do a poll like this because the radical Muslims would kill them and close off their access to them. The accusation you implied that I was contradicting myself was unfair because I spoke of the pre-war Iraq in terms only of Saddam's point of view. Since his was the only one that mattered back then, then no, he wasn't in favor of the U.S. taking him out. These polls are all after our current occupation began, so the Iraqi general population wanted Saddam out before but their vote didn't count, lest they be put in a paper shredder feet first.
So, be fair now, has the U.S. in the last 100 years ever invaded a democracy? I'll give you a man-to-man comparison: If you, Faithless, came to my house armed and said you wanted to kill me and my family I would do all in my power to immediately prevent this, including violence (Iraq). If you, Faithless, were a voting member of a group which also had reasonable members, yet voted on balance to kill us or at least be positioned to kill us, I would definitely use diplomacy (Soviet Union). If you were a peaceful member of a voting democracy who told me I can't be allowed to defend myself as I see fit and did all in it's power to weaken me, but did not attack me, I would try diplomacy at first (17 U.N. resolutions against Saddam) and then tell you to get lost when you continued to weaken me rather than the armed guy threatening me (France). I hope my view isn't entirely American and makes a little sense to you, and appreciate the civilized way you carry on your arguments Faithless.
_________________
I have AIDS and I smell kinda funny. Let me win and I won't, like, touch you er anything.

[faithless]

It´s interesting that you have problems reading my post. I never had these problems so far and I wonder that my English seems to be too bad to understand what I want to say.

Sorry, at the moment I don´t have the time to answer all of your post, just this:
You asked:

[-deleted103]

Also, whatever Woodrow Wilson did right or wrong 85 years ago has little bearing on the present. Germany IS INDEED a democracy and I think we can agree that the world is much better because of this. One mistake he made was installing a Yugoslavian DICTATOR with an iron fist to rule over at least 5 different ethnic groups which all hated each other. We are attempting to set up a democracy in Iraq, so they can argue their differences civilly. Americans--Democrats against Republicans, blacks against whites, etc. argue with each other nonstop without killing each other for the most part. I'm sure your country does as well. We did not pull out of Germany and Japan during those 6 years after the war and we hopefully won't pull out of this war until things have been straightened out and Muslims can stop killing Muslims.
_________________
I have AIDS and I smell kinda funny. Let me win and I won't, like, touch you er anything.

[-deleted103]

If you honestly feel Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan were democracies so be it. Those mock elections these countries had were well noted as such by your own government if you live anywhere in Europe, including those false democracies from much earlier. Your own government agrees with us on this. By the way, those southeast Asia millions of deaths occured AFTER we left Vietnam and the murderers were free to carry on as they wished in Cambodia and Laos.
_________________
I have AIDS and I smell kinda funny. Let me win and I won't, like, touch you er anything.

[googoomuck]