From: Dickey, Michael F (michael_f_dickey@groton.pfizer.com)
Date: Mon Jan 20 2003 - 09:05:05 MST
-----Original Message-----
From: Samantha Atkins [mailto:samantha@objectent.com]
"I think we are more noble as Americans when we take our heritage seriously
enough to avoid entanglements all over the globe
engaged in for highly questionable reasons and at very high costs at all
levels. We have no business as a free people going
to war except in very clear circumstances. Iraq is NOT such at this time."
Samantha, thanks for your comments. I can only ask what would you consider
those 'very clear' circumstances to be? As free people, do we not value
freedom, and in doing so, wish freedom upon others? As extropians, I should
hope that we prefer all humans, regardless of ethnicity, geography, or
ideology live under a system which grants them basic constitutional rights.
By being 'anti-war' with regard to IRAQ, you are necessarily 'pro corrupt
murderous despotic dictator' What of the IRAQ government, and Suddam's
manner of oppression, do you find morally defensible? Since a state is only
a collection of individuals, the only moral states are ones that exist as
extensions of individuals, IRAQ is no such state, it is built on murder,
oppression, corruption, and deceit. Given this, I do not understand your
claim that we have 'no business' going there as 'free people'? Should we get
in the habit of just not caring about people unless they are Americans?
> Emancipation was not delivered by cousin Abe with his Emancipation
> Proclamation but by my great great uncle (and thousands of others) lying
dead
> in the military graveyard in Nashville, Tennessee (and other places).
"So all you understand and consider honorable is war, might, death and
destruction? If so, then I pity you."
War committed in an effort to free people and dispose of murderous dictators
is both 'honorable' and more importantly morally justified. Do you consider
'war' to never be honorable under ANY circumstances?
"What is this "we"? You will sit this one out due to age and cheer other
"boys" on to their death in a more senseless
conflict than even Vietnam was. Bully for you."
Given the events that transpired in Indochina after the peace and anti war
advocates 'won' and forced the US to abandon Indochina to the corrupt
despotic murderous regimes of Mao, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Min and the Soviet Union,
and the resultant millions who were murdered or killed, I do not understand
how one can consider the Vietnam war 'senseless'.
Perhaps what was 'senseless' about it was that, in addition to many poor
military decisions and political decisions, was that we gave up and
abandoned those people to collectivization and labor camps. I hope that the
same thing does not happen here, and that we do not abandon the IRAQI people
to the hands of a murderous meglomoniacal dictator.
Michael
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