[extropy-chat] IRAQ: Weapons pipeline to Syria

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Stephen Van_Sickle <sjvans at ameritech.net> wrote:
> --- Adrian Tymes <wingcat at pacbell.net> wrote:
> > We are no longer at war.  The organization which
> we
> > were at war with has been disbanded and replaced.
> 
> It has?  Well, if it has been replaced, then I would
> argue we are at war with the replacement, or it
> really
> wouldn't be a replacement, would it?  Or is that
> just
> arguing semantics?

Actually, we're supporting the replacement: the
current organization that most people outside (and, I
daresay, even inside) Iraq view as having the
(relatively) most legitimate claim to being Iraq's
government.

> US troops are killing and being killed.  If that is
> not war, I don't know what is.  It seems to me
> whether
> or not it is recognized as legitimate by others is
> irrelevant to the question.

War, in the sense that I meant it, happens between one
nation and another - between the US and Iraq, for
example.  Those who wish to overthrow Iraq's new
government are not themselves an organized nation.
The majority of Iraq's citizens no longer support the
enemy (even unwillingly, at the point of a gun).  More
to the point, the US is not currently under active
threat by the terrorists who wish to topple Iraq's
government (despite what the Bush administration would
prefer people believe).  (Some might say that the
price of oil is a national interest, and some
terrorists have been targeting the oil infrastructure
to lower the supply, but the rising price in US
dollars has more to do with other nations removing
their investments from the US in response to Bush's
actions in Iraq than with issues of supply.)

Again, this may seem like semantics - except that
"war" gives a lot of legal (and, in some eyes, moral)
powers that lesser military actions do not.

There is a distinction between law enforcement, even
violent law enforcement, and war.  Consider the case
of Columbia, and its drug lords with their private
armies.  The drug lords are organized enough that one
could almost say the Columbian government has been at
war for the past several years, yet they do not see
the need to slap down wartime anti-propaganda efforts.
This organization is lacking among the insurgents in
Iraq.  (Then again, so is the regard for innocent
life: the drug lords do not take the position that all
who do not actively oppose the government are their
enemy.  Businessmen do not, for the most part,
wantonly kill their potential customers or employees:
such activities tend to be unprofitable in the long
run.)