Forbidden Donut

to give you scale, ANunes, a "ten thousand pound bomb" (also known as an "arc light bomb" in the military) is a large cannister with 5 tons of LP/LNG in it dropped from a C-130 or similar aircraft with a proximity trigger on it.

An arc light, used in Desert Storm, was dropped 22 miles away from me, and yet, for about 30 seconds, it was daylight bright where we were.

A LNG boat typically ships 500-1000 tons of the stuff, I believe...and an arc light is used to level small to medium villages (small to medium in Iraqui terms, anyhow, dunno how that fits into American town size, but an LNG boat could easily ruin a whole harbor if it went "boom")

You know what i find scarier, tho? the "3 oz of liquid bottle law"...it takes far less than 3oz of serin or ricin in liquid form to kill everyone on an airplane...so a small hand sanitizer bottle could easily do it. add that th the fact that you can CHECK large bottles in, and have them carried in the hold....

it's this kind of nonsense that should make everyone question the validity of the war. I mean nobody is happy with it, but why isn't congress, the people who are theoretically aware of ALL these laws, calling out the administration for this clearly inconsistent policy. We're worried about terrorists, but only where there is oil. Not Irish terrorists. Not African terrorists. Not American terrorists. Not terrorists at sea. Just the Arab kind.

thats totally unfair. there are fronts to the war on islamic-facism all over the globe so dont buy john edward's assertion that there is no war on terror.

It's not John Edward's assertion. It's mine. We just sent some more Marines back into Afghanistan, which isn't an oil producer... but apart from that and Iraq where are all these other fronts to the "war on terror"?

And besides. Let's say it *isn't* about oil. Ok, so we're only interested in Islamic terrorists. So we're racists. That's much better, you're right.

Islamic terrorists can be Arab (Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq), Persian (Iran), Asian (Pakistan, India, Indonesia), White European (England, France), American (Adam Gadahn) etc etc

Which is why we're fighting them in Iraq, and... where else?

thats pedestrian man.. we arent fighting them anywhere else because we lack the willpower and resources
edit: i noticed this story today: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/...,550583,00.html

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/...,545410,00.html

= german nationals converting to islam, training in pakistan, and GOING to afghanistan to carry out attacks (they could go to iraq just as easily which shows we are fighting them 'over there')

Ok. I concede that Islamo-fascism extends beyond the middle east. Any time an entire culture can be made out to be victims there will be worldwide (if not widespread) support for them. I mean we will never ever ever march an army into Germany to root out the terrorists. And there are other kinds of terrorists besides the Islamic ones. It's the most inconsistent campaign possible. Whether it's a war for oil is, of course, debatable. But what is abundantly clear to me is that it ISN'T a war on terror.

In Iraq we've seen it heralded as a necessary precaution against WMD's that could fall into terrorist hands under Hussein's irresponsible rule. No WMD's. We've seen it heralded as a war against tyranny as we toppled a cruel and militant dictator. We've seen it heralded as a neighborly responsibility to our comrades in the region to leave the country stable after doing all this. We're not fighting terrorists over there from what I've heard and read and seen. We're protecting our soldiers and allies from the terrorists that happen to be there.

It's like this:
Some dude threatens to stab your family. Do you
A- Sit in your house with a shotgun and wait
B- Leave your family and look for the guy

If you chose B you're missing the point. If I'm not home I can't guarantee my family's safety. If I'm hunting some homicidal asshole I can't guarantee my safety either, and if I die I certainly can't help my family.

So by my thinking they are not only failing to offer me adequate protection. They are spending a SHITLOAD of money doing it, and killing a significant number of innocents as well as getting our guys killed. It doesn't even make political sense given current approval ratings. I can't think of a justification that I can attribute to what I believe to be a farily intelligent group of leaders except that it's in our best interest not just to root out terrorists for our physical security, but almost more importantly to improve the stability in Iraq. And since the only things Iraq has been able to offer are intolerance and oil... I've bought into the theory that we're not trying to import the intolerance.

I would think of your example like this:
The guy wants to kill you really badly no matter where you are and he doesnt care if he kills the people around you in the process. Do you stay home to fight him and let there be the possibility that he blows up your house and your family because you are there? Or do you announce that you are going to be leaving and will be willing to face himm away from your family?

and.. we are fighting the terrorists over there. Al Qaida claims Iraq is their number 1 front. Osama bin Laden wants Baghdad to be the capital of his Islamic caliphate.

What Osama Bin-Laden wants, what Al-Qaeda claims, are not necessarily reality.

And why would you announce that you are going to face them away from your family? That's just asking for them to go straight to your loved ones. You said it yourself... these are terrorists. What makes you believe anything they say. And what makes you think they won't blow your house up just because you aren't there.

9/11 was an attack on civilians designed to send a message to our leadership. It worked and we are running the risk of playing right into their hands.

Letter from al-Qaida #2 al-Zawahiri to al-Qaida-in-Iraq #1 Zarqawi (now dead) in 2005:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/security/lib...er_9jul2005.htm


Dear...

Iraq is the heart of the Islamic world...

Worldwide jihad

Iraq will be the center of the caliphate.

Who's next? Oh thats right, the great satan America.

= leaving the Middle East entirely will not placate them as Paulnuts believe

Nope, I definitely do not want AQ to gain in popularity.

The US is a paper tiger.

AQ and Iran willing to work together.

No wonder the people of Iraq turned on him and formed the Awakening Councils.

I don't mean to sound like a jack ass, which I probably am, but I've got no reason to believe that anything al-Zawahiri says or said about, basically, anything. All of his power hinges on the contingency that the people he's leading, and the rest of the world, believe that Al-Qaeda is a super powerful, super dangerous, and super dedicated group of people. I don't buy it. They are dedicated. But blowing your supporters up on the enemy is, and always has been, a desperation move. Granted, it took a couple of big ass bombs to destroy the Japanese war machine 50 odd years ago, but that was an entire nation. We're fighting a fairly small, but loud, group of people.

They never had the resources to do the damage to this country that we did to ourselves trying to protect ourselves from them.

They killed 3000 americans
We killed 4000 americans
They destroyed a symbol of the American economy
We destroyed the American economy
They united the country under a banner of patriotism
We tarnished the international image of our country for generations to come

We're much better at it than they are anyway.

bah I tried so hard to convince you =\

http://patdollard.com/2008/04/ap-news-aler...d-in-airstrike/


I guess we have been fighting them elsewhere =)

touche sir.

But we should still be more focused on protecting ourselves rather than leaving ourselves open for buttfuckin.

Anunes, I don't know how young you are, but if you're over 25 you should remember that the war in Iraq is separate from the war on terror, our presence at this time is because of our fears of the results of a civil war in the region, we complete our objective with the overthrow of Hussein and the Ba'athist regime, we were asked by the UN to maintain a presence to avoid local civil war, and have maintained our presence beyond that original request while attempting to back and shore up the new government, while allowing it to establish itself firmly enough to survive. The insurgency is part of the group that wants to topple the new IRAQI government and install one of their own, against majority rule (the current government was democratically elected under interim government election process), they're targeting us partially because we're preventing that.

I'm 21 foo. I realize that technically you're right, but it sounds like a load of crap. That's like saying that Vietnam was separate from the "war" on communism. In 20 years this occupation will be intrinsically related to our "war on terrorism" rhetoric.

But yeah, the UN can be considered responsible for our continued stay there. It was a kind of "your broke it you bought it" sort of thing. But we went there in the first place because:

- Wikipedia (with citations)

We were worried about said WMD's because we were told that Hussein had ties to terrorists, specifically Al-Qaeda.

But no. It's not part of the war on terror.

yes it is part of the war on terror! al-qaida claims iraq as its #1 front as indicated above!

You realize you're disagreeing with the one person in the thread who attempted to back you up, now, right?

Actually, Bush and Blair were concerned about WMD because Hussein had threatened Israel with use of a missile against it that violated the cease-fire agreement of 1991...why the hell we ONCE AGAIN ran to defend Israel is beyond me, but they're considered a political ally, and we did have an international contract vis a vis that cease fire agreement, which HUSSEIN petitioned the U.N. for in 1991 to begin with, to end our assault which was our reaction to him invading another ally, Kuwait in 1990.

WMD may not have been found, but remains of facilities to produce them which had obviously not been dismantled when they were supposed to be, nor had they been dismantled properly according to the agreement were, beyond a shadow of a doubt, found, as were missiles of types that were banned by this same treaty...he broke the treaty and we were well within our international rights to resume hostilities as a result.

And evestay, NOW it is considered part of "the war on terror" because al-quaeda is supplying insurgents and equipment to certain groups of the insurgency...mostly because they have a vested interest in getting a friendly government in place, instead of the democratically elected one currently serving. Iraq isn't part of the "war on terror", but "Operation Enduring Freedom" (the part that came AFTER toppling Ba'athist Iraq) became part of that war when the insurgency started using terroristic means to attack, and started getting people and supplies from self-proclaimed jiihadists.

fair enough

You have a good memory Psycho, and an excellent sense of the real scope of this conflict. But I remember Colin Powell's address to the UN. And if you're trying to tell me that we didn't go into Iraq because of a salt shaker full of anthrax and suitcase WMD mythology, I'm shocked.

There's 2 pages before but they're not the bread and butter of his Top 10 Why-we-should-wipe-Iraq-as-we-know-it-today-off-the-map List

Colin Powell's UN Address 2/5/2003
43 days before the invasion of Iraq.

Oh no doubt they thought there was something more...we had "good" intelligence from Egypt that had Hussein trying to sell WMD components and products to Egyptian "terrorist" cells. Information that later turned out to be smoke and mirrors, and possibly manufactured as part of a US operation (in which case this wasn't "conspiracy", but was a case of one hand not knowing what the other was up to), this is true, but we did know of violations of the agreement, which was reason enough to justify our action under international law, even if the rest of the reasons given were so much B.S. (which, I admit, many of them were "aimed at the gut, not the mind" attempts to get the majority who won't think with anything else, or who have short memories...this was 10 years after the fact, after all, and "ancient history" in the eyes of the second biggest group of voters (the young voters) in the nation).

But what I'm saying is we had valid reason, we had rational reason, and we had legal reason to start this up...after that, I question whether we should have agreed to stay in place, or whether we should have told the U.N. to staff it with Internat'l troops, if they were so concerned with propping up a "democratic form of government in Iraq" that may or may not be feasible.

Dick Cheny himself stated that Iraq and Afghanistan are just the first steps in "the endless war at the end of the petroleum age"...he may be right, we may NOT be able to stay out of conflict once we hit the "Hubbard Peak" of oil production, which is projected to be no later than 2010 (and likely already happened) at this stage of technological development. Then again, with oil companies showing record profits, maybe the expense of producing a barrel of oil has not yet increased to the point projected by Hubbard.

Unquestionably, soon enough we'll reach the point where it becomes progressively more expensive to extract the same amount of oil from the Earth (we're only able to skim off the top 30% of the world's known oil reserves at current levels of technology, and even with this new record-breaking reserve found in Brazil, we'll consume it in snap time...with better technology we could pump more out, cheaper, but it hasn't happened yet...I'm betting it will shortly after the Hubbard peak makes itself known in retrospect, as oil companies try to keep a major market share while new technology, such as the HHO engine that uses solar power to turn water into HHO (note, not hydrogen and oxygen, but a new configuration of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom which forms a gas that burns exothermically and returns to water form...it takes more energy to produce than it produces itself, of course, but this is true of every renewable resource, by definition, but the power supplied is solar electricity, of which we can have a surplus simply by farming our deserts, which is already being done in CA for a large percentage of their total electrical consumption...this just more efficiently turns solar power to usable energy than direct conversion of solar-to-electricity) makes an inroad...either the oil companies will change to producing these new fuels, they'll use new technology to try to retain their "market share" of energy production, with ever more failing efforts until they go "extinct", or they'll just fold as new technology successfully replaces them instead of supporting them...it doesn't matter which, it'll be an economic "bump" in the road, no worse than the Depression, no better then the 1970's oil recession...we may be in political chaos and conflict as a result of oil barons losing their hold on the world, but it's nothing "serious" to worry about...we'll get through it, as a race, and probably as a Nation, as well.

Now I was a bit young to care too much at the outset. That's how long this shits been going down. So I don't remember it all TOO clearly. But I don't remember thinking the reasons were very rational. The official deal had to do with Hussein's failure to cooperate with weapons inspectors, right? He had some agency he made up to monitor the inspectors, he denied having or making weapons and we had seen evidence that at the very least he was trying to make something. All well and good reasons to forcibly go in and police the situation.

Reasons throughout the process:
1) Ensure that Iraq doesn't have WMD's and eliminate the country's capability to make them.
later
2) Unseat the tyrannical ruler who was not in fact making the WMD's. (this is my big problem, "He doesn't have wmds after all! Well... as long as we're here..." It's bullshit.
then
3) We have freed the people of Iraq. Violence will be high for a while during the transition. We should stay the course.
4) There have been votes and an elected official has been selected! We will oversee this governments development and protect its leaders. We should stay the course.
5) Violence is down. The war is working. We should stay the course.
6) Violence is up. If we leave now it will be a disaster. We should stay the course.
7) Bad Guy X has been caught. Only 929028 terrorists to go! We should stay the course.
8) Good Guy X has been killed in action. We would be doing him/her a dishonor to leave now. We should stay the course.

So based on the less than stellar record of spinning everything into whatever it needs at the time, I don't know why we should believe anything they've ever said really. As for the REAL reasons. The official reasons. I don't think they were justification for war. We were scared and angry. We didn't go to war with Russia when they WERE setting WMD's up in our backyard. What happened to responsible leadership and accountability?

Good questions, all....I still agree with unseating Hussein, but then again, I thought we should do it back in '91, when I was over there, and got stopped by an "emergency halt" less than 50 miles from Baghdad, while Hussein pleaded with the U.N. to stop "that nasty coalition that was knocking on his front door".

What I don't agree with is our continued presence over there, that's the U.N.'s responsibility now (or should be), and the continuous "breeding" of excuses to maintain such a presence.

Doing it back in '91 would've been better because we wouldn't have needed to remind Americans that he was a jackoff.
and maybe you could've pulled the trigger /wink.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=";)" border="0" alt="wink.gif" /> If you're into that sort of thing.

I don't understand what the big deal about finding WMDs was. So we didn't find them, is that really a big surprise? When you have an entire country to hide them in, and a government ruled by fear and brutality, its pretty easy to make things disappear. We know he had WMDs. He used them countless times against his own people, killing tens of thousands of his own citizens. Trying to say "We never saw WMDs so he must not have them" is retarded. No one ever enforced his getting rid of them. There was never any record of how many he had, and he never let anyone into the country to double check that he was doing what the UN told him to do.

So what you're saying, Phey, is that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Maybe that there are known knowns and known unknowns, but that it's important to also recognize the existence of unknown unknowns. Things we don't know that we don't know. /tongue.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":P" border="0" alt="tongue.gif" />
[post]
My problem is that I don't think we actually went there for the WMDs. I think that word was said the thousands upon thousands of times it was said in the months leading up to our invasion of Iraq for no other reason than to rabble-rouse the US into caring enough to keep us quiet long enough to get us entrenched in a country that it perceived (falsely) as vital to our economic survival, but more importantly to their bottom line.

There. There's my crazy conspiracy theory that I've been trying to avoid saying.

Would've done it gladly, had there not been a full corps of military closer to him than I was, we were third tier back at 50 miles when the "emergency halt" was called, closest troops were within artillery range, we had good information on exactly where he was (SATCOM technology watched him being moved into a particular bunker, he nearly shat himself publicly when our media released that information)....coulda been SOOOO easy to just tell the U.N. "well, HE started it" and fillibustering in the ICC system while finishing the job off real quickly....

Still we should protect LNG tankers.

Yup, agreed, don't need a 5KT arc light going off in Seattle harbor

Berkeley might be ok though.

Is Berkeley a portage town? That might not be TOO big a loss.

I only say Baltimore would be a loss because all the nice parts are around the harbor. So JUST the shit parts would be left.