Are you for or against the war in Iraq?

[Microbasic]

The progression of the war has changed many opinions. People against the war have suddenly supported it and (fewer) people for the war are now against it.

So, just wondering, CURRENTLY, do you support the war with Iraq?

Also, please do not start an argument on whether the war is right or wrong. I just want to know how many people support the war and how many are against it.

[WiKiDJeFF]

According to President Bush the "war" is over.

[NotLKH]

My position Has not, and will not change.

-Lou

[KayJay]

Nor has mine.

[WiKiDJeFF]

Neither of which we are aware of.

[KayJay]

Originally posted by WiKiDJeFF
Neither of which we are aware of.

Ok. I will go through the whole thing again. For you.

[WiKiDJeFF]

Originally posted by KayJay
Ok. I will go through the whole thing again. For you.

Thx.

[honeybee]

It's no war, it's an invasion

.

[Wally Pipp]

Where's the middle ground option ? I think we've had enough of the Them-or-Us policy now.

[Xanith]

Yeah I want a 3rd option too. I’m Anti-Murderous Dictator.

X

[honeybee]

Originally posted by Xanith
Yeah I want a 3rd option too. I’m Anti-Murderous Dictator.

X

Don't tell me you oppose Bush and Blair

.

[Xanith]

Originally posted by honeybee
Don't tell me you oppose Bush and Blair

.

OK I wont tell you

X

[Memnoch1207]

I was extremely pro war when the war first started, but I think they made some mistakes during the initial campaign...It should have been a swift attack (blitzkreig style). instead of planning this and planning that...I think the wasted time and eventually gave up the element of suprise, which is essential in situations like this.

The war, according to Bush, ended May 1st. However, 77 american and 10 british soldiers have been killed since then.

I think they have to make a decision on what they are going to do...a) Implement an all out, no holds barred search for Saddam and his sons, using what ever means are necessary to capture them...or b) start pulling out the troops and allow the interim iraqi government to start governing on its own.

otherwise, this conflict is going to continue for years to come, at the cost of thousands of soldier and civilian lives.

Not to mention they are still fighting in afghanistan as we speak...and my best friend just go shipped there last tuesday. He may never come home and his wife is expecting their second child on the 15th of this month.

For most of you this is just news you read or hear on the television. For me it's personal, I fought in the first Gulf War, and I have friends risking their lives in iraq and afghanistan.

[Shaggy Hiker]

I was heavily anti-war at the start. I have never felt that Bush was honest about his reasons, or that it was the proper thing to do. I still feel this way, but we are there, so we'd better make the best of it.

If we run off and abandon Iraq, we have failed. If we don't install a secular democratic leadership in Iraq, we have failed. If we fail, we will be far worse off for having started the war in the first place, and until recently, I felt that failure was likely. Now there is the first tentative step towards a new Iraqi government, and some comments that suggest that somebody over there has an effective plan. It may still die, but it looks like we are moving in the right direction.

However, we stayed so far from the moral path that even with moving in the right direction we cannot recover what we have lost. Not with this president.

[Xanith]

I was heavily anti-war at the start. I have never felt that Bush was honest about his reasons, or that it was the proper thing to do. I still feel this way, but we are there, so we'd better make the best of it.

Can you please explain to me what you think the reasons were we went to war and why you felt they were not honest reasons for going to war? Can you also explain to me how removing Saddam from power was not the proper thing to do? I will be very interested in hearing your views and answers to these questions.

If we run off and abandon Iraq, we have failed. If we don't install a secular democratic leadership in Iraq, we have failed. If we fail, we will be far worse off for having started the war in the first place, and until recently, I felt that failure was likely. Now there is the first tentative step towards a new Iraqi government, and some comments that suggest that somebody over there has an effective plan. It may still die, but it looks like we are moving in the right direction.

So we would be better off still having Saddam in power in Iraq? You are going to have a hard time selling that to anyone, considering he was the top mass-murdering dictator that was still alive on the planet.

Regardless of what happens now it will be the Iraqi people that will have to decide their destiny. All we can do is push them in the right direction. But now they have something more than they ever had under Saddam. The Iraqi people actually have a choice and a voice in their future government. They might succeed and they might fail but at least now they have a chance, they had no chance under Saddam.

However, we stayed so far from the moral path that even with moving in the right direction we couldn’t recover what we have lost. Not with this president.

Moral path? I am unsure as to what you mean by this. A coalition removed the top mass-murdering dictator alive on the planet and now it has begun installing a democratic government. How is that straying far from the moral path?

Also I think this president has a lot more moral character than his predecessor. At least this president can admit his mistakes and move on not shake his finger at you and lie about how he didn’t have sex with an intern or asking what the word “alone” or the word “is” means.

X

[Shaggy Hiker]

The top mass murdering dictator alive? Do we keep score? Who's up next?

Xanith, I understand your position, and really doubt that anything I say will ever change your views. You stated that you believe that Fox is unbiased, that alone shows the depths of our difference. However, you did ask about my belief on the first thing.

I believe Bush went to war because alot of his advisors felt that his father hadn't finished the job. All the talk about rationale was a smokescreen for this simple reason. Going to war "because we want to finish it" probably wouldn't fly very well, so other reasons were put forward. I do expect that profit was part of the mmotivation, but it doesn't have to be. A memo written (I think by Richard Perle, though I'm not sure) within days of 9/11 asked how that day could be used to justify an attack on Iraq. Attempts were clearly made to link Iraq to 9/11, but none of them held water. Thus we see the strategy in design and implementation, but don't see quite why that strategy was in place.

As for would we be better off with Saddam in place, the selfish view might well be that we would. As bad as he was to his own people, he had nothing to gain by attacking the US. Any support he supplied to terrorists were to boost his support in palestine. That's not good, but we have a chance now to make things alot worse. If we were to simply pull out now, he'd be back in place in weeks, with far more Iraqi bloodshed to follow. If we can get him, or destabalize bath, then pull out, we will almost certainly be facing an anti-American muslim fundamentalist nation. The bloodshed that would follow that would include ours.

As for the moral path, that is a bit ambiguous. However, we used the same language and rational (or at least tried to) to attack Iraq that the soviets used to attack Finland early in WWII. It was reviled then, and taking it as our own ought to make a few people, even conservatives, queasy.

[WiKiDJeFF]

I never really understood how people could take such strong view points on this issue. In this non-linear world it is simply impossible to predict the many outcomes that invading Iraq would have. There are certainly pros and cons to doing so, as with any political issue, but neither of those views can be proven right or wrong. The question becomes, do the pros outweigh the cons. However, it is impossible to weigh them, therefore this question can not be answered. Just as the butterfly effect says small changes can produce extremely large consequences, and large changes will produce astronomical consequences, what those will be is impossible to predict.

[Shaggy Hiker]

THe butterfly effect, and other chaotic phenomena assume that you don't move the strange attractor. The normal oscillations of the system orbit an undefined shape, but they orbit within known boundaries. We can make changes that **** the strange attractor such that the orbit still exists, but the range which is possible is now higher or lower than it was before. We may not be able to make the world a better place by taking out Saddam, bad as he was, but we can certainly make the world a worse place, that would be easy.

Consider when Hitler attacked Stalin. Hitler thought he was attacking a great evil, but he was himself a great evil. Trying to figure out whether the world would be better off with one or the other victorious would be pretty difficult, but we could easily figure out an outcome where the world became a worse place.

[WiKiDJeFF]

[

THe butterfly effect, and other chaotic phenomena assume that you don't move the strange attractor. The normal oscillations of the system orbit an undefined shape, but they orbit within known boundaries. We can make changes that **** the strange attractor such that the orbit still exists, but the range which is possible is now higher or lower than it was before.

Could you clarify this a little?

[Shaggy Hiker]

Did I mistype the word shift, or did the censor mis-read it?

Chaotic functions oscillate, just like a sine wave oscillates. However, a sine function is oscillating around a known point (0)....well, most people think of the sine wave as being a linear thing, but the sin function (sin(x) as x goes to inifinity) just repeats the same set of figures, and describes a circle since once x>360, sin(x)=sin(x-360).

This is oscillation around a point attractor. Other types of functions oscillate around different shaped attractors, though I don't offhand have any good examples of them. The attractor is like the planet that a sattelite orbits. The function will take on some value within the range of values in its orbit. A chaotic function has a pretty broad range of values it can take on, since the attractor for this type of function is not well defined. However, the function will always remain within this range. The function isn't random, and can't return a value outside it's range for any set of inputs. You can see this by looking at the simple function X(n+1)=b(1-X(n)) which behaves chaotically for some values of b (try in the vicinity of 3.8). The oscillations look regular, but you will note that they never repeat. You will also note that they never get larger or smaller than certain values.

What I was saying was that it would be possible to shift the whole system. It would continue oscillating, and the oscillations would look the same as before (or they could, they don't have to), but the range of values the oscillations attain would be higher or lower, depending on which way you shifted the system.
I've seen this in biological populations when some event radically altered the carrying capacity of a system. The population fluctuations looked the same, and were of the same magnitude, its just that the population sags were higher than the highpoints used to be.

[WiKiDJeFF]

Yes, what your saying is exactly what I've been thinking about for quite a while. Although small changes to the initial condition have the potential to dramatically change the outcome of the system, the chances are that each individual event won't effect the outcome beyond a order of magnitude. However, I'm not sure whether or not this applies to all situations. Any small (virtually unpredictable) event can lead to huge unforseen changes relative to our world. In the case of Iraq a single butterfly could make or break the situation. Long term effects are especially hard to forcast.

Another problem is that these issues usually come down to our own morals and personal feelings which vary for each individual. None of our morals or view on how life should be are necessarily correct, no matter how clear it may appear to be.

[Xanith]

Xanith, I understand your position, and really doubt that anything I say will ever change your views. You stated that you believe that Fox is unbiased, that alone shows the depths of our difference. However, you did ask about my belief on the first thing.

I don’t believe I ever said Fox was unbiased. All news organizations are biased to some degree or another. Some however such as the BBC and The New York Times have faced criticism for false and erroneous reports. These organizations just happen to be on the left side of the fence. That is why I believe it is always important to rely on sources from both sides so you can pick out the crap. Just relying on such left leaning sources such as the BBC, The New York Times, CNN, and even regular network news will give you a distorted picture (if not a totally false one) of what is really going on.

My advice to you is to check out the right leaning sources and see what they have to say. Then decide for yourself what you want to believe. But don’t limit yourself to organizations that just cater to your beliefs because it makes you feel comfortable. Seek out sources that you normally wouldn’t to try and get some perspective and see where the other side is coming from. You might just change your opinion.

X

[Shaggy Hiker]

Good point, though I probably find right wing sources as gut churning as you find left wing sources. Interestingly enough, if you read the literature of either the far right or the far left (and I mean literature that is so far out that it is essentially underground), they are remarkably similar. The difference is in who they advocate violence against, but techniques and views are otherwise quite similar.

[WiKiDJeFF]

I like CNN. I find fox news to be a pretty good comedy.

[Shaggy Hiker]

I don't own a TV, and never watch any of the TV news channels unless I'm stuck in an airport with nothing to read, and no good games on the tube. I did see a little of FOX early in the war, but found them boring (to be fair, there wasn't anything going on, but they could hardly ignore 'the war' just because nothing was happening at the moment).

No news channel does much news anymore. An hour is too padded with pseudo-news. There might be one or two real topics, and the rest is celebrity promotions in the form of news. Even if they stuck with real news, they can't really show enough to cover a story as thoroughly as you can get in print media. The best of the conservative press is in print, while the news and radio are consigned to Limburger and sound bites.

[WiKiDJeFF]

I like online news. It tends to be geared more towards actual news instead of public interest and entertainment.