[extropy-chat] Mr. Bush's Magical Effectiveness

[Samantha Atkins]

Lee Corbin wrote:
> Randall writes
>
>   
>> On Apr 28, 2007, at 10:01 PM, Lee Corbin wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> Goering understood Germany of the first half of
>>> the 20th century, but he did not truly understand
>>> the nature of freer countries where dissent had
>>> a long tradition. Do you think that Bush today
>>> could simply fabricate a "Gulf of Tonkin incident"
>>> the way LBJ did and get a declaration of war
>>> out of Congress against Iran?   Of course not.
>>>       
>> Of course, he could.
>>     
>
> And now with a Democratic Congress????   What
> are you smoking.  He can't even keep the leader
> of the House of Representatives from executing
> her own foreign policy.  Somehow I just think that
> if Bush said that a terrrrrrible event happened in
> the Persian Gulf and we needed to go to war with
> Iran right now, he'd be asked for a lot of evidence.
> Actually, the understatement of my last sentence
> is staggering.
>
>   
>> It would be a lot harder now than the mere
>> suggestion of WMDs was, but he could certainly
>> do it and have a good chance of working, for a while.
>>     
>
> No way.  Besides, as I said earlier, for a lot of us
> the WMD wasn't really the issue.  On the Extropians
> list at the time I listed *five* reasons that I thought
> invading Iraq was a good idea.  The WMD was
> probably about reason #4.  (The idea being that
> while there was no immanent threat, just as Bush
> said, it seemed clear that Hussein's heart was set
> on getting some nukes sooner or later, and he seemed
> just crazy enough to use them on us, or have some
> unaccountable stooges do it for him.
>   

That thinking was obviously fallacious as I pointed out at the time.  I 
was right.  Did you learn anything from it?  It doesn't seem like it.   
We had been monitoring and bombing the infrastructure of Iraq for a 
decade.  There was no room to put together the technology to become a 
full nuclear power.  At the most Hussein could have bought a few loose 
nukes like any other well-funded hothead in the world.  Was he stupid 
enough to use them against us?  I doubt it very much.  Does that 
possibility justify invasion and the death of hundreds of thousands and 
loss of hundreds of billions of dollars?  No way.   And here we are 
willing to make excuses for the creatures we allow to run our country to 
do something equally stupid and reprehensible in Iran.  Seeing such I 
seriously doubt this species is long for this universe.

> But that's not the main point.  You don't think---
> especially since there has been no serious terrorist
> attack against the U.S. in the last five years that
> a (now Democratic controlled!) Congress would
> give him carte blanche all over again??
>
>   
I think there are those in power quite capable of concocting any type of 
incident they deem necessary to further their agenda.  I also think that 
the only real reason we went to Iraq and are hot on Iran is oil and the 
Peak thereof.   As we are studiously not doing adequate work to find 
actually workable alternate energy that underlying motivation is not 
going away. 

- samantha