Talk is over

[D-Dave]

Well interesting read so far and a few things I'd like to add.

@Occhidiangela
To most extend I do agree with what you say but one bit realy bugs me. The so often quoted "inactivity" that lasted 12 years is somewhat realy just one from a certain point of view.
During this period of "inactivity" Saddam Husein was not able to take any military aggressive actions. Furthermore, amassing Forces in the Gulfregion during the last months has led to the Iraqi leadership to cooperate with the UN never seen before.
So my question is: If this "inactivity" has shown so much progress lately, why is there a need to stop the inspectors work and attack now ? I will not speculate on the motives as this will just lead to pointless discussions.


@Jarulf
Interesting point there (the good guy / bad guy comparison) and I think I have at least one good reason for why this attitude is so common these days. Media!
Yes big bad media, maybe not responsible for kids running amok in schools, but it clearly defines how the wide majority "experiences" war and especialy the consequences.
Lets rewind 12 years and switch to CNN. Press conference by Gen. Schwartzkopf. Pretty impressive thos IR Images of Bombs hitting exactly where they were supposed to hit. Good thing about this green/white images is that one does not see the flames, not the debris clustering out, nothing but a neat white flash of censorship. "Now that must be a clean war, I have seen it on TV."
Not so public were those pictures of a Laserguided Bomb blowing up a Camel 'cause it identified it as a Tank, neither the ones of the rear camera of a Bomber that hit it's Bunker and the WO commenting "damn, half of the bunker exloded right into the houses around it"

The realy interesting part about this sort of News coverage is that it has dramaticaly changed since the Vietnam war. Well maybe someone thinks it was a bad idea to show dead soldiers as people may actualy realize that people die in a war, yes even those soldiers fighting on the "good" side.
My conclusion: News during the time of war are not news but strictly censored bits of propaganda...just like they were in WW2.

Well, lets go a bit further. One thing that realy struck me is the change of the undertone found in so called anti-war movies.
An exellent example are the movies based on the attack on Pearl Harbour (as there are numerous from all the different decades since the 1950's)
T
hose up to the end of the ~1960's were all pretty much the same, showing the Horror of being bombed, stating how evil the Japanese were for attacking without declaring war first and not showing any aspect from a japanese point of view. Well those movies were clearly made with the intention of somehow getting the "trauma" of not being invincible out of american minds.

During the post Vietnam Time up to the end of the 1980's was a time when some true anti-war statements were created in Hollywood. In this time a Film was released that showed two young men growing up, joining the navy and airforce, leaving their families to play their part in the Pearl Attack, washed ashore next to each other being both dead...what made this movie special was that one was american and the other one was japanese. The clear message of this time was: War will lead to death and noone will ever leave a war without walking the fine line between a soldier and a murder (Platoon and Apocalypse now come to my mind being exellent examples for this times attitude)

Well lets warp forward to the most recent Pearl Harbour movie. Now that is something that realy makes me sick. Pretending to be historicaly correct but being biased in the worst possible way. Example? No problem, Japanese fighter planes deliberately shooting nurses running towards the hospital on one side (slow motion and close up) american bombers on the other Hand blasting a whole industrial complex (which seems pretty much abandoned by it's personal) showing maybe a couple of far away shilouettes being consumed by the dust of the explosions. Well it all comes pretty close to the newscoverage about the 1991 Gulfwar.
Just as a sidenote I'd like to point out that rating this attack as especially evil due to the fact that war was not declared shows only one thing: ignorance, else every military action taken by the united states since WW2 would be evil as the US has never formaly declared a war.

Mind you reading the last few paragraphs that I am not justifying the attack on Pearl or the war as a whole in any way but just trying to show how much the presentation of war has changed back to the worse.


Another thing I'd like to add that somehow fits Jarulfs topic of learning from colonism is about the repeated quote of bringing freedom to Irqi people. (which in my opinion is absolute rubbish) What the past 15-20 years have shown is that a change of system from within works a lot better then one forced from the outside. The whole eastern block (Soviet Union, Poland, Tchecheslovakia, Hungary, East Germany...) got rid of communist regimes and it worked. (apart from Tchechenia) South Africa got rid of it's racist regime and florishes now. China is shifting towards human rights and personal freedom from within every day.
On the other side the leadership of Jugoslavia was taken out from outside and the conflict is still not solved by now, Afghanistan is extremely unstable.
So what I am saying is that sometimes it may be wiser to be patient and wait till a change happens from within especialy if the danger for the rest of the world is as limited as it was with UN inspectors searching the Iraq for Weapons.

So, another extreme lengthy post but I'd rather give the reasons for what I state to avoid misunderstandings.
Greetings
Dave

P.S. I am german, very opinioned about this conflict and not exactly in line with the german official position but in sort of a similar direction. And I am by no means anti-american, I just think Bush is to dim minded to be put in charge of the most powerful military force on this planet.

[concre+e]

everyone involved will have to make their case to the tribunal some day

I sure hope that's true, Nystul, I really do. And I can think of a few people who'll be in for a big fat surprise then. As it says in the Bible, you will know them by their fruits. The Christian faith is basically about love, forgiving and other things some may think of as "hippy crap". And not about mentioning the names of God and Jesus in every other sentence and saying "God bless me and my buddies" or something to that extent a lot.
Ah well, I guess it says "judge not, that ye be not judged" as well... B)

[concre+e]

To bad some countries doesn't learn from history and think they can do it so much better. Yeah,, that is indeed the mentality of an upgrowing teenager

The analogy that came to my mind in the last months was Cato's "ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam". Carthago had stopped being a threat to Rome since decades, had lost two wars against them but for Cato, it had to be destroyed, its pure existance seem to pose such a huge threat that he was obsessed with that idea. Well, he had his way 146 BC, with the first opportunity when Carthago seem to not "behave".
Well today, such a window of opportunity has opened for someone else in the middle east, and they are not going to let it pass unused. Of course, today's methods are more subtil, not simply destroying a place, and of course it's called "war against terror" and "liberating people". Woohoo!