mr mahs

You and Chomsky are wrong! The speeches given highlight the humanitarian suffering as well as the WMD issue. If you don't agree please ignore the endless hatred you have for the man and listen to his addresses... http://www.bushcountry.org/bush_speeches/president-bush-speech-091302.htm President Bush's Speech To The United Nations September 12, 2002 In 1991, Security Council Resolution 688 demanded that the Iraqi regime cease at once the repression of its own people, including the systematic repression of minorities -- which, the Council said, "threaten(ed) international peace and security in the region." This demand goes ignored. Last year, the U.N. Commission on Human rights found that Iraq continues to commit "extremely grave violations" of human rights and that the regime's repression is "all pervasive." Tens of thousands of political opponents and ordinary citizens have been subjected to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, summary execution, and torture by beating, burning, electric shock, starvation, mutilation, and rape. Wives are tortured in front of their husbands; children in the presence of their parents -- all of these horrors concealed from the world by the apparatus of a totalitarian state http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030319-17.html President Bush Addresses the Nation March 19, 2003 I want Americans and all the world to know that coalition forces will make every effort to spare innocent civilians from harm. A campaign on the harsh terrain of a nation as large as California could be longer and more difficult than some predict. And helping Iraqis achieve a united, stable and free country will require our sustained commitment. We come to Iraq with respect for its citizens, for their great civilization and for the religious faiths they practice. We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people. Sounds like a humanitarian effort to me..

NONSENSE!

Just like Bowling For Columbine this article is pure... FICTION!!!

Maybe if Arafat wasn't involved, then real peace would occur...

Our beef is with the govt not the innocent people of Iran!!!! I agree with everyone here, in your posting of this article in a positive light is just plain wrong....

Your mother is a FOOL for not swallowing you.... Read what the article says... It states that a BIG part of VA benefits are given to "well off" individuals and this is where the pull back is occuring.. Now I know you're as sharp as a dildo when it comes to business sense so you couldn't fathom that the program is flawed especially when it's paying for services for people that are not in need of it.... Think about this for one hippie second OK? If you provide to every veteran even those that were NOT hurt in combat and to people are financially capable of taken care of themselves don't you get less from the 64 BILLION provided for VA benefits?? See Mr Hippie the way you fix a business model is elliminate waste not throw more money at it.... The idea that the Bush administration is somehow stingy with the VA is simply absurd. The VA budget has increased by about a third, going from $48 billion a year to $64 billion a year. This year, the VA will provide educational assistance to more than 400,000 people, and guarantee home loans of another 300,000 people, with the total value of about $40 billion. If Dean thinks this is ungenerous, what would be his alternative — giving veterans lifetime everything-for-free cards?

You're Lost Sadam!

It was a tactic used to persuade the iraqi's to defect and abandon their posts... It didn't work as planned but it definitly didn't target civilians..... it wasn't relentless bombing we picked and chose what to hit and when... Think about what you are saying and how bad it could have been...

HUH? Shock and Awe? where were you in March a K hole? Didn't you see the palaces on fire and traffic in the streets of Bahgdad? Check your history books jack, what the Germans did in England in WWII was capret bombing.... We picked and chose what to hit granted there were some mistakes but it could have been 100x worst... Oh and the only thing that will limit the financial burdon to all of us is that black gold in the ground of Iraq... This argument has already been dismantled before...

Did we carpet bomb Iraq? Don't you agree with the might of the U.S anad Britain military, Iraq could have been turned into a parking lot? Anyone ever taken by Sadam never returned, big difference...

What?

No Sadam not adhering to the ceae fire agreemnet after Gulf War I had nothing to do with those sanction right? Or his CONSTANT defiance to the INTERNATIONAL community because remember it was the U.N that placed those sanctions on him.. It amazes me how people can blame the U.N as if they just decided one day, to place sanctions on that madman and completly ignore what occurred for those sanctions to be put in place..

Dude you are such a conspiracy ridden tool.. Why don't you really find out whats going on before spewing your rechid anti-american bile...... Read lost one, careful no pictures so it can be tough........... :laugh: Misleader.org Thats wher you get your info??? Priceless:laugh: http://www.nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry200312180910.asp Howard Dean and the boys might have just lost one of their favorite anti-Bush lines on the stump — "He can't even find Saddam Hussein" — but not to worry. Dean still has another biting criticism of Bush national-security policy echoed by other Democratic candidates as well — that President Bush has supposedly slashed veterans off of their benefits and cut combat pay. As it happens, these charges have as much merit as the can't-find-Saddam taunt in the wake of the dictator getting pulled from a hole. Dean has said of Bush routinely on the campaign trail: "One night, Friday night — he hoped the media wouldn't notice — he announced that combat pay was being cut because 'mission accomplished.' One day last January he went to a Veterans Administration hospital and said that veterans deserve the best pay, the best health care that money could buy. That was the day after he cut 164,000 veterans off their health-care benefits. This president doesn't get that the defense of the United States depends on the men and women he sent to Iraq and depends on the veterans who came home." In today's free-spending Washington, the charge that anyone is being cut off from anything or that any spending is being reduced has, shall we say, an inherent implausibility. Indeed, no one is being cut off from their veterans benefits. Here's the background: For 80 years, the rule was that the VA would take care of veterans with medical problems related to their military service or veterans without the means to purchase their own health care. In the mid-1990s, Congress decided to open the VA health care to all veterans, prompting a flood of new entrants into the system. Today, the VA treats a million more patients than it did three years ago, for a total of about five million. This sure doesn't sound like cutting veterans off benefits, but maybe they reckon such things differently in Vermont. Dean's charge does have a wisp of a connection to reality. Because the VA system was overwhelmed by a flood of new patients — many of them relatively well-off — it established a new rule saying that veterans with no medical problems relating to their service and an income above a certain threshold are not eligible for VA care. The rule affects an estimated 164,000 people. These are Dean's 164,000 veterans "cut off" from benefits. But they can't be cut off from benefits, because they never received them. The VA grandfathered in everyone already receiving care to make sure no one would be cut off. The idea that the Bush administration is somehow stingy with the VA is simply absurd. The VA budget has increased by about a third, going from $48 billion a year to $64 billion a year. This year, the VA will provide educational assistance to more than 400,000 people, and guarantee home loans of another 300,000 people, with the total value of about $40 billion. If Dean thinks this is ungenerous, what would be his alternative — giving veterans lifetime everything-for-free cards? Dean's combat-pay charge is just as deceptive. The Pentagon earlier this year opposed extending recent Bush-instituted increases in "imminent-danger pay" and "family-separation allowances." It wanted to maintain the current pay of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, but through different means. This was all rendered moot when Bush signed into law in November a bill preserving the imminent-danger and family-separation pay increases. So no cut in combat pay had been proposed or took place, but Dean goes his merry way, charging otherwise. There's a lesson here about the recklessness of Dean and the other Democratic candidates who ape his anti-Bush rhetoric. But that these charges are presented by Dean as a telling critique of Bush national-security policy also demonstrates a certain lack of seriousness about foreign policy. Dean seems to imply that we are going to wage the war on terror with really, really generous veterans health-care benefits. Yeah, right — and we can't find Saddam Hussein.

This article is another example of how the flexing of American military might has despotic regimes conceding to a new world of diplomacy.. "with us or against us"!!! great article! http://slate.msn.com/id/2093015 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- When Pan Am 103 went down over Lockerbie in 1988, it took my friend Berndt Carlsson, a Swedish diplomat and former chairman of the Socialist International who had become the United Nations' special rapporteur for Namibia. So active had he been in working to free Namibia from South African apartheid and occupation that some people speculated on a South African role in the atrocity. As so often is the case, this speculation was useless because it was so rational. Those who put bombs on civilian aircraft usually don't much care who is on board; their point is made by the pile of random corpses in the wreckage. (It's amazing to me that one still has to argue this point with those searching for nobler motives: The explosive is just as likely to be on Noam Chomsky's or Michael Moore's flight, and one day they may awaken to this self-evident fact.) Just as I think that Osama Bin Laden made the greatest conceivable error by demolishing the World Trade Center and thereby retarding the cause of jihad to an incalculable extent, so I think that his followers have repeated the mistake in Indonesia, Turkey, and perhaps above all in Saudi Arabia. Three years ago, sympathizers of al-Qaida controlled the government of Afghanistan, heavily influenced the ruling circle in Saudi Arabia, and were in a good position to take over the Pakistani state from within. They were also being sought out for meetings by the regime in Baghdad. Now they have lost Afghanistan, are being hunted in Saudi Arabia, are being killed in the rat holes of Iraq, and stand little if any chance of seizing power in Islamabad. Their charismatic leader is almost certainly dead or at least incapacitated: Even the pretense that "communiqués" are coming from him has practically dried up. It may sound like a callous thing to say, but Bin Laden did us all a favor by showing his fangs in that way and then neglecting to have a Plan B. Col. Qaddafi, though, has lived to rue the mistake he made with Pan Am. He started the grinding of an inexorable machine, beginning with the deceptively modest processes of Scottish law, and he now stands before the world as a gibbering and whimpering psycho, forced to pay blood money and to beg for leniency. The latest development is the best of all: In a sort of reverse of the pre-emptive strike, he has agreed to disclose and destroy all his stocks of unlawful weaponry. The hawks are quite plainly right to say that this sudden tribute by vice to virtue is a direct consequence of Operation Iraqi Freedom. So is the new readiness by the mullahs of Iran to accept international inspections. It might even be true to say that the supposed failure to find WMDs in Iraq is a factor in this welcome surrender. I know I am having it both ways here because I actually believe that Saddam Hussein was concealing illegal weapons and was trying to buy them off the shelf from Kim Jong-il, but look at it from the point of view of a rattled and ramshackle despotism like the Libyan or Iranian one. (Wow—look what happened to Saddam when he was accused of fooling around with weapons and inspections and U.N. resolutions. And we know that we do have undeclared stocks. Is it worth the risk?) One can only be impressed at this triumph of reasoning over ideology. If riff-raff like this can be so convinced of our resolve, then we really must make sure that our resolve is as steely as they think it is. There's certainly an element of time-buying and calculation in both cases, but the compromise over WMD can, if properly handled, act as a curtain-raiser for regime change in both societies. Iranians and Libyans are not fools, and they have increasing access to non-state media. They know that their boastful and pious leaders have been cringing and conceding. In a more than subliminal way, this presages the end of governments that are bankrupt in other ways as well. In the Middle East perhaps more than in any other region at present, people are acutely sensitive to which is the winning and which is the losing side. The mullahs have run Iran into the ground over two decades, and Qaddafi has been in power since I was an undergraduate. Their rule is condemned by actuarial calculations as well as by moral and political ones, and it's now quite possible to envisage a future without them. The tipping point in all this is, and has been, and will be seen to have been, the liberation of Iraq. There are two things that the Bush administration could do to push this process along. It's become obvious that Pakistan has been involved not only in pirating nukes of its own, but in helping to proliferate them via North Korea and elsewhere. Until September 2001, indeed, it had overt Talibanists among its nuclear scientists, and nobody in Washington seemed to find this alarming. (If you want to be alarmed, look up Sy Hersh's New Yorker piece on how close Pakistan came to launching a first strike on India during the Clinton administration.) The greatest act of public diplomacy that the Bush team could now perform would be a high-level initiative to detoxify and denuclearize the Kashmir question. This is a far more dangerous and urgent question than Palestine. (Indeed, al-Qaida probably originates more from the Kashmiri swamp than it does from the Middle Eastern one.) Then it would be nice if Gen. Ariel Sharon was asked to declare his own stocks of nuclear weapons and was questioned rather closely about what contribution they make to regional security. For a start, where was Israel thinking of using such devices and under what circumstances? In the war against jihad, Israeli nuclear weapons are even more useless than our own. Precision-guided munitions, which take out the tyrant and spare the population, are the wave of the future. Not to end on too festive or seasonal a note, but the disarming of three rogue regimes in under one year isn't bad. If Howard Dean really believes that we are no safer than we were on Sept. 11 (and I presume he can't literally mean that the removal of the Taliban made no difference), then it's time he said what he would have done differently.

Amir TAHERI sometimes writes for the "post opinions" part of the paper...him and Ralph Peters and Dick Morris to name a few reputable authors....

Countless hours? Dude I work full time at a brokerage firm, go to school and have enough common sense to know Sadam was evil tyrant that did nothing but bring MISERY to the Arab world.. and it was Bush and Co that removed him for a greater good.... What do you do as a profession besides a professional FLUFFER?

WOW did you think of that rebutal all by yourself SADAM?

Great article! where did you get it the POST?

Happy HOLIDAY'S to you and yours bro!!!!!

:laugh:Classic!

Noone thought they would fly 2 planes into the WTC.... That's why we have a pre-emptive stance on threats to our security....

Economy-- CHECK... Terrorism-- CHECK... Medicare-- CHECK... ---------------------------------- Looks good to me so far... Wait until his next term then he tackles the massive Social Security problem..

I concur lol..

Mind boggling....

Makes our products cheaper overseas.. Historically it has only dropped 15% off it's high... Some companies have added close to 5% to their earnings but the only downside is the decline of foreign investments. As our expansion cycle continues and the deficit decereases foreign investment will pick up so all in all it's to our benefit right now...