"No new war on Iraq" protestors

Seriously. Even the wording of their signs betrays idiotic, moronic, mind-dead ignorance.

"No new war on Iraq"

Because helping the legit gov't of Iraq, who has requested US help, against a band of murderous wholesale slaughtering rampaging head-chopping heart-eating savages the like of which the world has scarcely seen since the days of Ghengis Khan's horde, is a "war on Iraq".







There isn't words in the English language to describe such an asinine disconnect.

I'm all for taking out ISIS, but I don't support sticking around to prop up the current fuckstick in power.

Bomb them deeper into the stone age.

The Middle East is a shithole. It will fall apart every time we leave.

Let them deal with it, but tell them. "If your shit spills over and hurts America or Americans the retribution will be swift. That also goes for whichever fuckhead finally ends up in power.

We shouldn't lift a finger until he agrees to a power sharing unity government.

I thought lots of liberals didn't believe in forcing the govts. of other nations how to conduct themselves.

How long have American presidents been trying to bring peace to the middle east? And yet here we are, witnessing a level of savagery unparalleled in modern times. These people don't want peace. They want the slaughter. They thrive on the chaos. It's their culture. We can't change that. All our interference and military presence in the region has done is escalate the violence to medieval levels.

No matter the structure, it will always be seen as a.U.S. puppet regime, and therefore the violence will continue unabated.

There is a huge difference between forcing someone to do something, and not signing on board with their agenda as long as it doesn't suit you.

Maybe you should drop your partisan blinders then, and take people's views on a case by case basis. You and I agree more often than not on foreign policy, for example. Don't expect people to fit in to one of two tightly defined boxes, hardly anybody at Wordforge does.

Point taken gul.

But, forget it hamburgers are done!

The usual dribbling morons appearing in this thread I see. A few topics for the opening post retard and his Arkansas minion to go consider:-

1) ISIL is not the only aggressor in Iraq. Several groups who oppose the current administration but do not agree with ISIL have nonetheless agreed to fight with ISIL in the hopes of standing a greater chance of furthering their own aims. This is not a pure fight between ISIL and the Shia government that the media plays it as. Notwithstanding, some of these groups have come out and described ISIL as savages who should not be allowed to gain power. The divisions are there in the opposing forces, let alone the country as a whole.

2) At a time when the Iranian regime is lead by a more moderate figure, the Shia regime wishes to support the Shia administration in Iraq for obvious reasons. This presents an ideal chance for co-operative dialogue between the West and Iran. Something that is an appealing prospect one once considered that the US neither has the support nor ability to invade and take over Iran, let alone before it acquires the bomb.

3) Many Iraqis, like it or not, do not see any great advantage to the gifting of "freedom" by us. They live there day to day in hell while we pontificate online. They still live in a nightmare, which we forced on them by having no reconstruction or exit strategy, so when an alternative comes along some of them will hope that the alternative provides greater domestic stability, just as how many Iranians didn't want an Islamic regime, but felt, at the time, it might give them a better option that the western installed totalitarian Shah.

In short, it's a very complicated situation that cannot by articulated by "war or not" arguments, or tabloid suckered douchebags like the OP. Worse still is that we helped to create this situation. A simple swift wave of the hand invasion is not going to solve this. It's about time for less comic foreign policy and more long term structured thinking.

I don't oppose military action in all instances, and I do think we (!) have a responsibility after fucking with Iraq over so many decades, and I don't want to see ISIS win --

-- but I don't see how military action in this instance will lead to anything beyond the most immediate relief. And since military action kills, that is simply not good enough a reason. Though if I were protesting, I think my posters would speak about American rather than Iraqi lives, foremost.

That whole part of the world refuses to exit the bronze age. It's a nest of hornets, and you don't settle a hornets' nest down by whacking it with a stick. You don't settle it down by not whacking it with a stick. See the theme here? There are only two things you can do with a hornets' nest -- suit up, douse it in poison, cut it down and then burn it, or leave it the hell alone. I don't see us turning the entire middle east into a sea of black glass, so the other option is to stay the fuck out of there. Quit dragging our asses about creating and marketing sustainable cold fusion to transform our domestic energy situation, and giving that entire fucking region the biggest middle finger in history. Of course, that's about as likely as us nuking the place.

This is the real crux. The choice is: Prop up the puppets forever, or let whoever is the strongest take over. And whoever is the strongest will almost certainly be whoever is the most brutal. Their culture simply has not prepared them for anything else.

Maybe "you" should have thought of that during your century of meddling and during the setting up of a country for a key political ally directly in the region.

It's far too late to play the "none of our business" card. Like it or not, you (and we) share partial responsibility for the region. Now your plan is to cut and run when the situation becomes more complicated than a Hollywood movie?

The time for debating the nuances is long over. Bombs need to start dropping. These people understand brute force and blinding violence. So that's what we should give them.

Yes, but which "them" are you going to give it to? Or do you not have the reading comprehension to articulate my post?

While this is true to an extent (and not just in Iraq but in any unstable region), I think there's a strong argument to be made that too much brutality is ultimately self-defeating.

In regards to the rest of the thread, I reject the idea that Iraq or Iraqis are innately backwards, and even moreso the idea that western intervention has historically been a positive influence in mitigating this. To maintain such a position in the wake of the astonishing criminal debacle that has been US policy over the last two decades is odious in the extreme.

While ISIS are no doubt an extremely bad bunch, it is absolutely right that people are skeptical of the motives of anyone who wants to begin a new bombing campaign, and that the bar is set suitably high before such a thing is considered.

You think I spent a century fucking with the hornets' nest? That was me? Well, shit, I've been an industrious boy, h'ain't I!

We could have started with the columns of trucks and stolen military vehicles that were advancing on Baghdad last week, but Obama wimped out.

Honestly, at this point I don't care who we kill. We just need to start killing some arabs. These animals need to be more scared of what we'll do if they don't get their shit in order than they are of a rag-tag militia that wants to impose sharia law and brutalize school children.

I completely agree. But a desperate wish to fulfill that responsibility does not automatically translate into a good plan. So far, I can't see that we have one. Do you think military action is going to help right now? If so, which action, and how?

If you don't consider yourself American I am sure there are lots of your countrymen who would happily see you renounce your citizenship. If not, STFU, accept that if you want to be billy big mouth on the internet who says what his country should do then that means you're taking a level of responsibility for what it has already done. Can't have your cake and eat it. One or the other.

To those saying we should fix it since we caused it...

How?

If we go in...we know how that goes.

Just throw money at them? Yeah...right.

Bomb the fuck out of them?

I am not settled at all on the best course of action. I think we have fucked up that country, and the region in general, good and proper, with many, many years of meddling, and I genuinely don't know now how we can assist or what the moral course of action would be, such has been our mulch-faceted level of interference. What I do know is that we can't possibly pretend that we didn't have a hand in what is now happening, whether we have minority reponsibility or no. Had we kept out hands clean for the past century, perhaps we come at this from a more moral standpoint.

Who has actually said that?

Sorry, but where in the quote does it say "we must fix it"? It is entirely possible to engage in what is happening over there and accepting one's own personal responsibility in it, without it being our sole or overriding duty to "fix it", as you so crudely put it. Clearly you are too asinine to understand my first post in this thread, the very point of which was to illustrate that the current situation is far more complex that taking simple sides.

I consider myself to be an individual American. Not to terrify you or anything, but there's more than just the one American. We're not just cells in gigantic, shambling, immortal behemoths. I haven't been around for a century, so no, I haven't been doing shit to that region of the world for a century.

And "facing up to one's own personal responsibility" means exactly that. I wasn't personally there, I didn't personally do a fucking thing over there, so my own personal responsibility does not intersect the problems of warring tribes of camel fuckers to the slightest degree.

A whole century of it, basically.

"All the kings horses and all the kings men..."