Iraq, Glaspie, and Wanniski

http://www.independentpoliticalreport.com/2009/01/thomas-sipos-on-angela-keaton-and-ron-paul

PA aka Jim Davidson, thanks yet again for making disagreement with me seem even more unreasonable than it is.  Now if only I could somehow establish that you're not a sock puppet I'm using to my own advantage... 

Loved the lame chickenhawk jab. Next you'll rebut me with the formidable kindergarten argument of: "if you love Iraqi liberation so much why don't you marry it?"

I already pointed to my analysis of the Keaton charges: http://more.libertarianintelligence.com/2008/12/apology-angela-should-offer.html

My Waco exception for my friend Paulie is not bait and switch, it's the opposite: I said I wouldn't debate him on the topic, and then I conditionally changed my mind.  I don't ask people to answer everything I've written -- I just point out that I've already answered every argument being offered here.  If you don't like it, then stop whining about it, and try coming up with an argument that I've never answered anywhere else before.  Go ahead. Make my day. (For example, your tiresome L. Neil Smith quote is answered at http://libertarianmajority.net/more-libertarian-than-thou and http://libertarianmajority.net/major-schools-of-libertarianism.)

Michael Wilson, you're saying that a dispute about alleged slant drilling is grounds for annexation via a war of aggression, but that genocide and multiple wars of aggression aren't grounds for liberating a nation from a madman?  That's simply sick.  Meanwhile, the Euro theory is just funny -- a perfect little unfalsifiable conspiracy theory, just the right size for the minds in the antiwar choir.

Paulie, thanks for in effect admitting that you fear that I'd demolish any particular alleged Bush "lie".  That's the only reason I can think of for you declining to embarrass me by picking any one lie out of your allegedly bulging arsenal.  That was your last chance; the Australian Open finals and Super Sunday ads are upon us, so we'll have to continue the Bush-lie topic the next time a thread gets conscripted for (anti)war duty.

Fear of retaliation by evil people against America for America doing the Right Thing just isn't a big worry for me, sorry.  I guess I just am not as easy to intimidate as you.  Or maybe I have more confidence that a free and prosperous society can successfully defend itself.

Here it comes, the trotting out of the past mistakes in America's foreign policy.  Yes, America has done some horrible and shameful things in its past.  That's just not a good argument for me that America shouldn't do the Right Thing in the present or future.  As for trotting our the past, I'll repeat this unanswered list: England, Italy, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Greece, Germany, Austria, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo.

Saddam's bodycount is estimated at two million: http://www.moreorless.au.com/killers/hussein.html.  I don't want your DU search terms; I want a credible estimate of demonstrably DU-caused deaths.  If it's not well into the thousands (when of course it's more like zero), then by your own accounting it adds nothing -- other than the unthinking sensationalism of shouting "uranium!" -- to your case.

Madeleine Albright making an idiotic off-the-cuff statement on camera doesn't rebut what I wrote above: "UNSC Resolution 706 of 1991 offered to allow Saddam to sell oil to buy food and medicine for his people while he was under UN Security Council disarmament sanctions for his blatant war of aggression. He refused for five years. Reason magazine says that the estimate of 1 million deaths is inflated, but whatever the number, Saddam was responsible for every single one."

The Wanniski article you chose to highlight is worthless.  The vast bulk of it is about Saddam's conditions of imprisonment.  It contains ZERO evidence about Saddam's genocidal policies, and instead just says that prosecutors wouldn't be including the genocide charges in his first trial.  The charges in the first trial were deliberately narrowed to those that most easily could win a death penalty, related to the well-documented mass killings of the inhabitants of the village of Dujail in 1982 after a failed assassination attempt against Saddam.  What you apparently don't know is that, two years after Wanniski wrote, Saddam was indeed put on trial for the genocide of the Anfal military campaign against the Kurds of northern Iraq.  However, the sentence from Saddam's first trial was carried out four months after the second trial began.  And that, Paulie, is what you get for relying uncritically on sources (like LewRockwell.com) writing stuff you already knew you'd agree with.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias is sexy but she is not your friend; avoid that bitch.

No, it's not accurate to say that Saddam was a "U.S. client". For details about that relationship, as well as how I've dug deeply into the question of Saddam's Anfal campaign and the alleged U.S. arming of Iraq, see e.g. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/2048.  I've got plenty more where that came from.

Sorry, but it's just lame to say that "no position" on how Arab diplomacy resolves a technical border dispute is the same thing as "no position" on whether a sovereign member of the U.N. should be invaded and annexed.  Glaspie told Saddam: "We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods via Klibi (Chedli Klibi, Secretary General of the Arab League) or via President Mubarak."  The only other time a sovereign member of the U.N. had been invaded and annexed was 1950.  America and its UN allies undid that annexation by force, and of course our diplomats don't go around repeating that story to foreign leaders every time they whine about a neighbor.

Yes, years of variously vicious and vigorous attacks on my liberventionism have left me exquisitely prepared to answer them. I'm glad you recognize that, and I don't pretend that you not answering my arguments means my arguments are unanswerable.  What remains annoying is when somebody like Mr. Linnabary blithely opines that those arguments don't even exist.   So Steven, I'm repasting this URL especially for you: http://knowinghumans.net/2007/04/defending-libervention-in-iraq.html.  Instead of calling me a "bully", try engaging my arguments.

Steven: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium#Studies_indicating_negligible_effects.  See also this: "Despite the visual impact of these photographs, experts claim that not a single serious epidemiological study has been undertaken in the region and the link between DU and genetic malformations is far from proven."  Anecdotes are not the same as epidemiological research -- no matter how good it makes you feel to call me names for pointing out this inconvenient truth.

Paulie, I said the "war!" _topic_ had hijacked this article, not any one person.  I didn't even mention Iraq or war as "divisive" -- I just included "no obsession with a single internally divisive issue" in a list of reasons why a previous editor did a better job than Sipos.  My earlier mention of "multiple antiwar articles per issue" would be a valid complaint even if I agreed with Sipos on the war. It was Sipos who thought that flaunting his antiwar LP outreach would bother me, but he was so mistaken that I didn't even notice that he did so.  What then happened was that Susan Hogarth, Rob Power, and Tom Knapp in quick succession all jumped in to beat their antiwar chests -- while Sipos slinked away instead of answering my point that he obfuscated the eight most charges against Angela.

Hey, no worries, it's fun to klunk some antiwar skulls together every once in a while. :-)  My time here is pretty much up, but I'll be back in a few days to make sure I get the last word. :-)