Explain to my why ‘Turn the other check’ is such a bad thing? Isn’t that the Christian thing to do? Or do you ignore Christ’s teachings when they are annoying.

I have no way of verifying this one way or the other.

Invading and enslaving your neighbors without provocation tends to do that.

Know what? You’re a big jerk.

Take note of that post because you’re going to be reminded of it every time you try to play the “liberals don’t support the troops” bullshit.

Congress is putting your birthday in as a national holiday. I mean, a guy who is famous for mountain biking? Now YOU are agent for social change!

The rest of us just aren’t worthy, seriously.
/sarcasm

Why don’t you list all the sacrifices you have made for your country, so we can match them against the sacrifices you are asking others to make? It’s easy to send others into peril, harder to go there yourself.

Why do I have zero respect for your opinions about war? Do the math.

Now, the money we have wasted building nothing and killing people would have been much better spent building hospitals, schools, road and bridges here, so next time you have a reason to complain about our health care, our crumbling schools and roads, remember you wanted to spend that money elsewhere.

I guess you don’t remember that we sent those planes over Iraq deliberatedly to draw fire and get an excuse to attack. The “no fly zone” was not something the UN created, it was a policy that we created ourselves strictly for political reasons. After all the Iraq air force, as we recall, consisted of nothing but drones, the rest having been destroyed in 1991.

Nothing that Iraq or Saddam did justified our killing tens of thousands of innocent people, destroying the infrastructure that supported them, killing thousands of our own people, and spending a trillion dollars killing people and breaking stuff. Not to mention making enemies of half the world.

We ha

I submit that if we had spent that money on our OWN infrastructure

“White House deputy spokesman Scott McClellan condemned the Iraqi attacks – at least four in the past few days – as “a violation that would constitute a material breach” of the resolution adopted unanimously by the council Nov. 8 to force Iraq to disarm”
http://www.michigandaily.com/content/us-will-wait-further-iraqi-no-fly-zone-violations

Why don’t you explain your quaint “turn the other cheek” aphorisms to my brethern in arms that were being shot at while enforcing the UN sanctioned no-fly zone? Seems like shooting at an american plane that is enforcing a UN no-fly zone might constitute an “attack”.

And repack, I did over a decade USN

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it. ~Thomas Paine

So you like quotations, duh?

Dig:

43 Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy: 44 but I say unto you, love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you;.

Sorry if I wasn’t too clear. I’m sure that Bush & Co. did have some deluded notion about forcing democracy on Iraq via revolution. I was referring to that non-exhaustive list you published later, when we propped up or installed dictators in the name of the Cold War, or protecting our oil supply, without caring one whit about the freedom of the people they oppressed.

And, duh, I make it a point not to discuss politics with people who bring out that old straw man the infamous “America Haters.” If you can’t tell the difference between honest disagreement with one’s government and “hating America,” then I’m not really interested.

I’m a US Army veteran. What branch of the srvice did you do your “heavy lifting” in, and what did you lift that was so heavy?

As a Vietnam era vet I am painfully aware that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a sham and that the excuse to do so was as completely manufactured as the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Bush was going to take us to war, and all he needed was an excuse that he could sell to fools. Unfortunately he found enough to accomplish his aim, although since then a lot of them, a majority in fact, have finally seen through the lies and now disapprove of the war.

Ther “heavy lifting” that remains from Vietnam is the huge number of traumatized men who were unable to live a normal life after enduring a year of horror. I was fortunate and did not serve in a capacity that left me permanently traumatized. When I served, it was just a year In Country, and now we have guys going back for a fourth or fifth. The price on our society when these people return will be enormous, and you have zero sympathy for them. I have seen this close up, and my heart breaks for them. You are a cold, unfeeling jerk.

Finally, WW II, during which my father gave up his job and built Liberty ships, and everyone lived with rationing of just about everything. We were attacked on our soil, Germany, Japan and Italy declared war on the United States before we reciprocated, and every member of American society participated in the sacrifice. You do not seem to know that.

Iraq didn’t attack us and didn’t declare war on us. Bush wants everyone EXCEPT the troops to enjoy this little skirmish, and does not ask for a single sacrifice from the rest of us. You didn’t seem to know that either.

You gonna learn something today?

Apparently you didn’t bother to do that Google search. If you had, you’d know why the AFSC won that Nobel. Then you wouldn’t be making errors like this one:

“I dont know how we could have developed a more “just” society that would have prevented hitlers rise….and apparently neither did the quakers, or they were keeping to themselves.”

Keeping to themselves? Not exactly.

The AFSC won that Nobel for working for a more just society–by helping German civilians between the wars. As a result, they were among the last groups expelled from Nazi Germany and used that opportunity to save the lives of thousands who might have otherwise been exterminated.

And, by the way, there are two of us here–Southern Quaker and Quaker in a Basememt. Not the same person.

Hitler rose to power out of the insane war bill forked onto Germany after WWI and the depression, which was caused by a too-steep difference between rich and poor.

when we set up petty dictators to protect our economic and political interests around the globe. That, more than anything else, is responsible for the mess we now find ourselves in with respect to Iraq and Iran

Syngmhan Rhee
Mohammed Reza Pahlavi
Fulgencio Batista
Carlos Castillo Armas
The Greek Military Junta
Ngo Dinh Diem

This list is, sadly, not exhaustive.

I don’t know Duh, I think ‘Hate America First’ is a little presumptuous. Seems to me she’s identified a pretty distinct post-WWII pattern.

Syngmhan Rhee
Mohammed Reza Pahlavi
Fulgencio Batista
Carlos Castillo Armas
The Greek Military Junta
Ngo Dinh Diem

This list is, sadly, not exhaustive.

I don’t know Duh, I think ‘Hate America First’ is a little presumptuous. Seems to me she’s identified a pretty distinct post-WWII pattern.

My point with regard to WWII has more to do with Quakers assumption that we could have somehow talked ourselves out of WWII. I dont know how we could have developed a more “just” society that would have prevented hitlers rise….and apparently neither did the quakers, or they were keeping to themselves.

I am also afraid that Quakers stack of soapboxes upon which she has been orating, is high enough to induce hypoxia. When you say things like:
when we set up petty dictators to protect our economic and political interests around the globe. That, more than anything else, is responsible for the mess we now find ourselves in with respect to Iraq and Iran
you have clearly lost the bubble. I make it a rule not to discuss politics with the “Hate America First” crowd.

S. Quaker, you and I are more or less of a mind on this issue, but that is a pretty broad brush you’re painting with. As ignorant and candyland an idea as it might be, do you really think those at the top don’t believe and never did believe in the doctrine of democracy via forced revolution? If you say that it hasn’t anything to do with that, it seems to me that it all has to have been a cynical sham. If that’s what you think, fine, but it stretches credulity for me to think that nobody involved in this was a true believer.

Earlier Duh made the oft-repeated comparison of the Iraq war to WWII. I believe that this, as I have stated before on this blog, is a dangerous and oversimplified false analogy guaranteed to cause the United States more and possibly greater foreign policy problems in the future. We cannot get by on ‘Saddam was a bad guy; Hitler was a bad guy’ and expect a rational foreign policy program.

Here is my take on this comparison -

–Iraq was a powder keg waiting to go off (with a strongman in the leadership role), ethnically, religiously and politically, governed by a religious minority that oppressed the majority – in other words, much more in common with Yugoslavia than Germany or Japan. Germany, Japan and Italy were more or less ethnically and culturally homogenous.

–Iraq was a relatively new country, a contraption invented out of the ruins of an old empire early last century, with a people with a long memory for the shame of western occupation. Germany was a western country, older than Iraq, and Japan was uncomfortable with western contact somewhat like Iraq but was much, much older as a cohesive society than Iraq, and its people have a cultural history of respect for authority.

–Both Japan and Germany fought traditional ‘capture-the-capital’ wars, whereas the accounts show that Saddam expected a guerrilla resistance against the coalition – which became an even more obvious eventuality after Bremer fired the entire military.

–Iraq is an Islamic country, a powerful unifier of peoples across national lines. The borders were porous enough to allow in foreign fighters. Japan and Germany had no such natural allies to help continue the fight, even had they wished.

–America started the Iraq War (therefore ceding a great deal of moral high ground, in the eyes of possible allies), and Germany started WWII.

–Iraq was fought after the great guerrilla successes (a fighting strategy of ‘wear them down and don’t lose’ that the Americans essentially helped pioneer, btw, in the revolution) of Vietnam, Algeria and the Chinese Civil War, whereas those had not yet happened when WWII was fought so that any loyalists to the old regimes has less frame of reference for success.

–Japan and Germany were put back together with the help of members from the former regimes, whereas under Bremer de-baathification was total.

That’s it for now, I guess. Errors? Cat calls?