From: Damien Sullivan (phoenix@ugcs.caltech.edu)
Date: Sun Mar 30 2003 - 20:31:33 MST
On Sun, Mar 30, 2003 at 09:10:41PM -0500, Spudboy100@aol.com wrote:
> Damien (Caltech!) stated:
> <<90% of Spaniards and French oppose the war.? And the Spanish government is
> one of our allies.>>
>
> De-fanging and destroying regimes which play the rogue state-terrorist
> alliances are emphatically, not a popularity contest. That the descendents of
> Laval and Petain, in France'; and Franco in Spain find opposition to the
> undoing of "their" oil suppliers and commerical customers, bothers me not a
> fig.
Wow. Ad hominem on the scale of whole nations. German and Japanese
opposition I suppose you'll dismiss because of WWII. The British, what, too
socialist? Ditto for the Canadians, despite all the peacekeeping troops they
send out. Eastern European opposition, despite their usually being our best
friends these days on account of deep appreciation for our role in the Cold
War, doesn't matter because...
At what point, in the face of collected world opinion, do you start
questioning your own conclusions, or your own view of the facts? If someone's
suffering mass delusion, why not you?
Do you really think hundreds of thousands of people are protesting, and the
poll results are so opposed, because of oil? French and Russian governmental
concern for oil contracts I could believe. But we're talking about the
popular opinion of a majority of the First World. When they say that bad as
Iraq is it's not worth a war, when they question the claims of WMDs and of
support for terrorists, asking for more evidence than forged and plagiarised
documents, how are you so sure you can dismiss them?
> This can't be right.. The USA, through democratic and republican
> administrations funded NATO at 85% total cost per year, during the cold war.
Oh, economic costs. I'd interpreted the claim about burdens we bore alone as
referring to lack of moral support. Yes, we've spent 3x as much of our GDP on
the military, and tended to have a bigger GDP, especially shortly after WWII.
-xx- Damien X-)
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