The Grading Curve And Statute of Limitations For Genocide

robert goodwyn wrote:

RG) if you had said anything to anybody about your favoring the war, I would say that you helped to get it started (RG

So if I talk privately to my wife at the dinner table about deposing Saddam, then I helped start "the war".  But if in my election campaigning and blogging I've publicly advocated against policing a civil war in Iraq, I'm still a pro-war "operative"?

It sounds like you've appointed yourself to be my own personal plaintiff, judge, and jury, with a predetermined verdict.  So when are you going to tell us how much you're awarding yourself in monetary damages?

RG) I'm really tired of this "Nobody told me a civil war would happen." (RG

I didn't say "nobody told ME".   I said that nobody told ANYBODY -- at least, not in any place where Google can find it.  I already documented for you a dozen incorrect dire warnings about the consequences of an invasion.  If you're "tired" of me reporting the non-existence of predictions of the Sunni-Shia civil war, then all you have to do is find one.  I bet you can't.

RG) You say "False"  to my summarizing your obligation for the war as less than one penny.  Your oddly-worded correction still seems to come to about that amount. (RG

What precisely do you find "odd" about the concepts of division and multiplication?  And if you think that I should personally owe you more than 1 penny, then what number are you proposing to put on your invoice to each invasion advocate?  Just how much of a war profit are you proposing here?

RG) The worst of Saddam's murders happened several years before your invasion. At the time you invaded, Saddam was not much worse than any other bad dictator. (RG

Saddam was defying UN Security Council inspection mandates about his WMD arsenal and about the nuclear weapons programme that we learned in 1996 (from Saddam's defecting son-in-law) that Saddam had earlier hidden from UN inspectors. No other dictator was defying such WMD inspection mandates -- especially not one who had already used WMDs both against his own people and in his wars of aggression against neighboring states.  As I noted, two of the incorrect dire warnings against the invasion were that Saddam would use his WMDs against our troops, and that in the chaos of invasion his WMDs would end up in the wrong hands.  Your "not much worse" is at best Monday morning quarterbacking.

And I just can't agree with you that there should be a statute of limitations for genocidal WMD-using neighbor-annexing tyrants.

RG) Your claim that more people would have been killed without the invasion than with it is flimsy, at best. (RG

It's no more flimsy than your implicit undefended claim that the unpredicted Sunni-Shia civil war wasn't inevitable whenever the bloody reign of Saddam and his sons ended.

RG) I'm not so sure that those 1.5 million people who died ten years earlier would have said "I got killed, so I want more people to get killed" (RG

I doubt that the victims of Saddams wars and genocides would have said to just give Saddam and his sons a pass.  Is that what you think their families advocated?  I've shown you video of such family members celebrating Saddam's downfall.  Can you point to a single family member of a Saddam victim who said in 2003 after the fall of Baghdad that removing Saddam was not worth the costs of the invasion?

RG) 64% is just not a passing grade where wars are concerned. (RG

As it happens, 36% is almost exactly the size of the Sunni minority that Saddam was using to suppress the Shia majority.  Are you certifying that a genocidal tyrant should be immune from forcible overthrow if he can buy off 36% of the population?

In the Confederate States of America, only one third of the people were slaves, and most of the rest were quite happy with the situation.  Was 33% there really "not a passing grade"?  What percent of the CSA would have had to be slaves for external overthrow of the regime to be morally justified?