From: Alejandro Dubrovsky (s328940@student.uq.edu.au)
Date: Wed Jan 22 2003 - 20:39:24 MST
On Thu, 2003-01-23 at 05:15, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> What I am saying is plain English--the very concept of "country"
> is an outdated an irrelevant one, and if you continue to think in
> those terms I remain unmoved. My standards, as I've said time
> and again quite clearly to everyone capable of listening, are
> simply that /people/ have the right to defend themselves or
> others against other people who would harm them or take their
> freedom. Any argument for going to war must be framed in that
> context for me to take it seriously. "Should the USA attack
> Iraq" is not even a legitimate question to me: the question is
> "Will it serve the American and/or Iraqi people for their present
> government to send troops to attack the Iraqi army and/or remove
> Saddam Hussein from power? I don't know--I suspect it's too
> soon for that. But I am totally unconcerned with the idea that
> I should "respect" the sovereignty or government of Iraq, or
> indeed of any country on Earth, including my own. I don't give
> a damn about countries, I care about people.
The immediate effect on war would be negative, assuming that some people
would die before they would have died if the war would not have
happened. How many people? No idea. Some people said 100,000 on the
last one, so if there's a repeat, I would consider it a big negative (if
a bus crashes and 10 people die is "tragedy", and 3000 on WTC qualifies
for "horrible, despicable event" and 6,000,000 gets a "holocaust", then
100,000 probably hits around "unbelievable massacre" label or so).
There would also be a sizable negative property score for damaged
buildings in Iraq, probably a sizable possitive property score to the US
military business and to world media businesses, some points for
enjoyment of "marines getting some action", some for the US population
feeling safer, some substracted for some of the US population feeling
guilty, and a sizable negative score for iraqi suffering at the loss of
relatives and friends, but none of those (except maybe by the last one),
I would think, would put much of a dent on the -100,000 full points that
we started with. Now, since the post-war effects are unknown, and I
can't assign probabilities to what the possible outcomes will be (if you
can, please post), they would have to be given a neutral or zero score.
In which case the war stays at "unbelievable massacre" level, and should
be a no-go.
alejandro
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