Sarah wrote:
You live in a representative democracy, not a direct one. You voted for Bush, albeit by the slimmest of margins. That means he gets to decide. That's what your democracy is.
No. Bush was NOT representatively elected by popular vote, in fact, he lost the popular vote and was elected instead by the electoral vote, which is a whole other ball of wax; especially considring that the conservative Supreme Court of the day, voted against allowing a full recount of the Floriduh votes, which showed after the election, that Bush would have lost if the recount had taken place.
Add that info to the fact that the eligible voter turnout was likely in the 30 percent range and the reality is that Bush in no way has a mandate from the American people to be asserting such a broad change of American foreign policy as exampled by his his push for military pre-emption.
One can readily see the folly of such a policy by simply taking each reason given by the BushCo adminstration for legitimizing the pre-emption on Saddam by applying them to the US itself. In each case, the US is far more of a threat by those exact criteria than Iraq could ever hope to be...including the idea that Iraq has a leader who refuses to listen to his own people. Shall we discuss which nation on the planet has the greatest number and variety of weapons of mass destruction? Shall we discuss which nation is the only one to have ever used nuclear weapons against a civilian population? Shall we discuss whether the US indeed has stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons?
This planned assault on Iraq is nothing more than a strategic manouver
that has been in the works for a decade or more and is being implemented by a salivating group of hawks whom themselves have never seen combat.
You would be hard pressed to find military people who have been in combat to express that this impending war is either necessary or a good idea.
The worst aspect of what is likely at this junction to occur is the fact that there is no aftermath planning and no real knowledge of what will happen in terms of terrorist acts on the US directly or what sort of destablization will occur in the Mideast itself.
This is an incredibly misguided action that will result in hundreds of thousands of human lives being destroyed for no good purpose.
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