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shawnmmcc
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Patroklas -- if you choose to refuse deployment in the Gulf because you see this as a blatant war of agression, based on "false witness" (as in "Thou shalt not bear...") by this administration, I would support you, even during your courts martial. As in not going to work today - closet libetarian. 
Or you could choose to be an unarmed conscientious objector medical corpman if they still have those - one of the highest loss rates and rates of decoration in Vietnam. Or, as I suggested using both US and Israeli examples, you could volunteer for more hazardous but more clearly defensive deployments, i.e. Afghanistan or West Bank border crossings.
Az - apologies for my assumptions. However, there is an interesting implication to your beliefs, besides the simultaneous convergence/divergence with Berz which I will have to roll around on my tongue and taste a while - the two of you are so close and yet so very far apart... 
What societies meet your criteria? The reason I am asking is that your definition seems so broad that no societies meet it - which would then bring your views into line with Berz.  You can see where I am struggling with this - I would suspect that only a few European country's are going to fit your criteria, and maybe some of the Commonwealth countries.
And if you live in a country right now that does not fit those criteria, and you do not have that open debate - then would the actions I or Berz describe be reasonable, especially if like Martin Luther King one was willing to live with the consequences? I am curious, your argument has some interesting nuances - and unless I am going to be a hippocrit, then I should be willing to consider them. 
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Az
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MACEDONIA - It's the name of the sovereign country to the north of Greece
Apr 2000
time: 07:37
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quote:
Az - apologies for my assumptions. However, there is an interesting implication to your beliefs, besides the simultaneous convergence/divergence with Berz which I will have to roll around on my tongue and taste a while - the two of you are so close and yet so very far apart... |
Berzie and I are ethical purists, in that we have strong, internally logical ethical systems. The only difference is that his isn't based on anything while mine is.  I've always respected extreme libertarians for this. I am an act utilitarian, and of course, while our ideas on the perfect society and it's rules may collide day and night, there are also many points of view we might share the same trench.
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What societies meet your criteria? The reason I am asking is that your definition seems so broad that no societies meet it - which would then bring your views into line with Berz. You can see where I am struggling with this - I would suspect that only a few European country's are going to fit your criteria, and maybe some of the Commonwealth countries. |
I don't think that any do, in the full sense, but there are many societies that come close. private capital and it's control of media, as well as the strength of international media hurt flaw this, as well as organized religion.
quote:
And if you live in a country right now that does not fit those criteria, and you do not have that open debate - then would the actions I or Berz describe be reasonable, especially if like Martin Luther King one was willing to live with the consequences? I am curious, your argument has some interesting nuances - and unless I am going to be a hippocrit, then I should be willing to consider them. |
This is an interesting question, and it's possible that there is no real answer to that, since any debate on whether a certain action is "reasonable/ethical/OK/etc." tends to be less and less meaningful the less there is a defined concensus of truth, and ethical value, or in the case that that this value is scewed, as it is in the US. However, in my book, his refusal would be wrong, since he isn't ordered to commit murder of innocent civilians, for example.
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shawnmmcc
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Az - the problem with your description of the individual in the armed forces, in this case, is that even if he is per se not killing civilians, he is by his very nature lending support and aid to this unjust war. If I did not have my little girl, and had a little more guts, I would withhold taxes from the government. But then making my little girl suffer for my own personal code of ethics now falls into your category of examining all the consequences of your actions. More revolutionaries are defeated by marraige and family than by any government.
I am VERY interested in what countries/governments/systems/cultures - they are all going to be involved in meeting your criteria - you view as coming closest to your ideal of a truly free county. FYI I consider myself an ethical realist, and what I mean by that is that I largely agree with both your and Berz's approach, except for one caveat. Once you get into the real world pure ethics can get awfully muddled - for example, if I withheld my taxes I would be hurting the effort in Afghanistan, which I consider ethical correct (except we put too few resources into it) versus Iraq which I do not think meets that criteria. Those confounding real world applications...
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Az
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MACEDONIA - It's the name of the sovereign country to the north of Greece
Apr 2000
time: 07:37
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Az - the problem with your description of the individual in the armed forces, in this case, is that even if he is per se not killing civilians, he is by his very nature lending support and aid to this unjust war. |
This is the place where we disagree. I just fail to see how this war is in any way blatantly unjust. I think that if it will be handled properly, if not by this administration then by the next one, it will still come out as a great ethical triumph.
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I am VERY interested in what countries/governments/systems/cultures - they are all going to be involved in meeting your criteria - you view as coming closest to your ideal of a truly free county.
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Oh, I fear that I am too ignorant of the indepth of most systems around the world to give out such an assessment. However, I am certain that some countries are more and some countries are less close to that ideal model, and their morals, will be self consistent and ethical. ( morals as in codes of law, and ideals of behavior of humans holding wide concensus, ethics as the logical theories of human behavior )
quote:
FYI I consider myself an ethical realist, and what I mean by that is that I largely agree with both your and Berz's approach, except for one caveat. Once you get into the real world pure ethics can get awfully muddled - for example, if I withheld my taxes I would be hurting the effort in Afghanistan, which I consider ethical correct (except we put too few resources into it) versus Iraq which I do not think meets that criteria. Those confounding real world applications...
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I realize what you're saying, and this is only natural. However, maybe you shouldn't worry yourself too much. It all depends on what is your ethical theory. For me, ethical purity doesn't really collide with realism. Ethical purity manifests itself, or to be more precise, is in whether the ethical valuation of different actions or scenarios is consistent and logical. Realism is nothing but the proper assessment of the chances of each of those hypotheticals actually coming to life.
Vel:
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Which reality would that be?
The one in which we found Iraq's vast stores of Weapons of Mass Destructions, or the one where we captured their fierce "Nucular Arsenal"? |
If you supported Iraq 2 over WMD, you've supported the war for the worst reason possible. OTOH, it does explain you switching sides .
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Berzerker
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topeka, kansas,USA
May 1999
time: 23:37
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Az quote:
Lies, or unpure causes. Afghanistan was just the same. If you're telling me that Afghanistan was invaded and siezed just because of 9/11, you're deluding yourself. There certainly were much bigger concerns. |
Sometimes people are just attacked to get what they have, and sometimes by people who dont have to lie about their motive(s). The Spanish wanted to rob and convert latin America and it did. If the Taliban handed over Al Qaeda, I'm pretty sure they'd still be in power. We were giving them money to wage a drug war and were not unhappy with the results. But this isn't about Afghanistan, its about Iraq.
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I would love it if you pointed out the contradiction, but it seems that you've missed my point entirely |
You went from:
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all battlefields are created by lying politicians. |
to
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The number of wars that were started by people due to motives that were pure and logical within the borders of their own belief systems is very low, and usually enjoyed the dubious honor of being wars waged by insane fanatics. Not all of them, mind you, but many of them. |
All to some
History reveals a pattern - the big swallow the small until the big becomes too bloated and gets lazy and keels over from heart disease.
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We cannot and shouldn't judge the justness of wars because of their motives. That doesn't mean that "we are morally obligated to fight for their lies", but that we are morally obligated to fight for good, and if it entails going to war over the commands of lying politicians, so be it. |
So this "good" over rules the law? I'd agree with that on so many issues because of government corruption outlawing our freedoms, but the question is whether or not the mother of a son who died in a war resulting from lies has the moral authority to demand answers from those who lied. Seems obvious to me...
A contract was violated in the extreme and we dont judge the guilty party innocent because we can see a "good" (and distant at best) result come of it. I'd remind you that we were in Afghanistan helping them gain their freedom from the USSR a few years back and that led to 9/11. So this "good" is so beholden to the future it is debatable, but not a justification to lie to others to purchase their existence.
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I think we've covered it. "Signing up to defend your country" isn't in the contract. |
If that is what the Constitution desires, but that same Constitution desires a CinC who wont lie us into a war. A President can be impeached for bribery and other high crimes and misdeamoners. Lying to attack another country is a bit more serious than bribery.
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One can't also claim to be fooled by the US military's media messages and propoganda in this matter, because those never limited the goal of the US military to the defence of the US, but also have always implied that the US military is a force for good in the entire world. Thus, there isn't any fraud in the moral contract. |
Very true, "society" has taught us the government tells us what the Constitution says and most go along with it. But when we're talking about moral justification, majorioty rule is not the standard. The fault here lies with Congress, not Sheehan. It is Congress who should have the President answering for his conduct.
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What made Afghanistan just? It certainly had little to do with the purity of US intentions, because there was no such purity. |
Take a poll of the American people and you will see the difference between pure and impure motives. About half believe Iraq was justified, and alot of those people cant or wont even figure out Bush and his cronies lied. Most people agreed with Afghanistan and no lies were needed.
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shawnmmcc
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Patroklos - simple question - and you have partial credibility due to your service - and total, once you volunteer for a ground deployment in Iraq - do you support the US intervening in other countries in "our national self-interest" as defined by our political leadership? (versus "defense")
I ask because if you do see that as justified, then you and I - and many of the posters here - have such a basic disagreement on premises that all we can do is argue. Neither you nor we will ever agree, our starting points have nothing in common except when the US is attacked.
But beware. Systems like that, as either Az, or Berz, or I can tell you - because we are working from ethical systems - have a vicious tendency to turn around and bite. What if Iran decided to help al Quaeda with a terrorist attack against the US?
The attack could be economic - do you have any idea what a coordinated outbreak of foot & mouth disease (which can be carried on your shoes) accross the US would do to our economy? And that would be easy. Hurting the US economy, and reducing our ability to support a large military capable of foreign intervention, would definitely by in the Mullahs' favor. Remember, they do have a "guided" democracy - the only limitations are that the Religious Caste gets to vet every candidate for his morals, and their are religious courts to insure morality. And of course in the US nobody runs on "Moral Values" and passing laws to impose them on others? 
Az - I see you argument for Iraq 2 - in fact I voted the second time against Bush Sr. over Iraq 1 and f*cking the Kurds and Shia. However, and this is a very pertinent question - how can we justify Iraq and not the Sudan, whose human rights violations are on an even larger scale than Saddam's. Saddam, as a secular monster, had one major aim - maintaining power. You could get peace if you did not resist - and accepted the slow steady destruction of your local language/religion/culture.
In the Sudan - there's not much you can do about being Black (are they Bantu, I suspect so I am not sure). There is nothing they can do about their genocide/ethnicide - if they do not revolt, they are taken slaves, they are still starved and killed, etc. So if our war against Saddam was ethical, and I understand your argument I used to think along those lines - why did we not intervene in the Sudan first? That is where your premise starts to weaken.
You could argue, from my own premise - ethical realism - you go for the ethically justified war that you can get, not necessarily the ones you should fight, since not everybody is going to subscribe to not only ethics, but the tenets you base your ethics on. That starts to approach moral relativism - I am NOT calling you a moral relativist, but I suspect that trap is what has created many of them. Of course, I do recall that I stated I was an ethical realist because of those "confounding real world applications." 
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Az
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MACEDONIA - It's the name of the sovereign country to the north of Greece
Apr 2000
time: 07:37
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Berz:
quote:
Sometimes people are just attacked to get what they have, and sometimes by people who dont have to lie about their motive(s). The Spanish wanted to rob and convert latin America and it did. If the Taliban handed over Al Qaeda, I'm pretty sure they'd still be in power. We were giving them money to wage a drug war and were not unhappy with the results. But this isn't about Afghanistan, its about Iraq.
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The Spanish were mainly after the gold, while their stated reason was to go mainly to "convert the heathen". How's that as an example of a lie.
WRT Taliban, maybe you wouldn't attack, but that's because you'd lose the pretext.
Not all to some, but all to vast majority. It's not a contradiction, but a slight weakening of the original argument.
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History reveals a pattern - the big swallow the small until the big becomes too bloated and gets lazy and keels over from heart disease. |
eh? how's that connected to our debate?
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So this "good" over rules the law? I'd agree with that on so many issues because of government corruption outlawing our freedoms, but the question is whether or not the mother of a son who died in a war resulting from lies has the moral authority to demand answers from those who lied. Seems obvious to me...
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She deserves answers about how he died, and she deserves answers about the general war as much as all of the american people. Not more, or less.
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A contract was violated in the extreme and we dont judge the guilty party innocent because we can see a "good" (and distant at best) result come of it.
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A contract wasn't violated. could you give it a rest? And yes, deeds breaking the rules that result in a good result go unpunished all the times, and even get commended.
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I'd remind you that we were in Afghanistan helping them gain their freedom from the USSR a few years back and that led to 9/11. So this "good" is so beholden to the future it is debatable, but not a justification to lie to others to purchase their existence. |
Oh, but I don't consider your "helping freedom" back then to be ethical, dear. You weren't "helping freedom", you were helping a bunch of insane people from the dark ages. And it bit you in the ass.
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Very true, "society" has taught us the government tells us what the Constitution says and most go along with it. But when we're talking about moral justification, majorioty rule is not the standard. The fault here lies with Congress, not Sheehan. It is Congress who should have the President answering for his conduct. |
Yeah, but that's what YOU think. You see, if you want to drown in legalism, and "breaching of contract" etc., there is no real problem with the system here: If congress feels that president messed up, they can vote him off. If they don't and the voter disagrees, they can vote him off, as well.
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Take a poll of the American people and you will see the difference between pure and impure motives. About half believe Iraq was justified, and alot of those people cant or wont even figure out Bush and his cronies lied. Most people agreed with Afghanistan and no lies were needed. |
 That's rich, coming from a libie. Since when the opinion of the majority of people mattered?
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Ted Striker
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United States of America
Jan 1970
time: 21:37
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quote:
Originally posted by Urban Ranger
Shooting at US aircrafts over one's own territory does not constitute an attack on the US.
Also, the "no-fly zones" were not only not sanctioned by the UN, but were completely illegal. |
There was actually an operation that was conducted over Iraq months before Desert Storm 2. In the operation, the Air Force basically targeted Iraq's air defenses and destroyed them.
Preparation for an invasion? Or just a coincidence?
This happened, by the way, while the Administration still had, "all options on the table."
quote:
June 2002-March 2003
The frequency of US and British aerial attacks against targets in Iraq's “no-fly” zones increases dramatically as part of Operation Southern Focus. [New York Times, 7/20/2003; London Times, 5/29/2005; Washington Post, 1/15/2003; Time, 11/27/2002; Independent, 11/24/2002] According to the London Times, US and British planes drop twice as many bombs on Iraq during the second half of 2002 as they did during the entire year of 2001. [London Times, 5/29/2005] Between June 2002 and March 19, 2003, US and British planes fly 21,736 sorties over southern Iraq, dropping 606 bombs on 391 carefully selected targets. [New York Times, 7/20/2003; London Times, 6/27/2005; Washington Post, 1/15/2003] As Timur Eads, a former US special operations officer, notes in January 2003: “We're bombing practically every day as we patrol the no-fly zones, taking out air defense batteries, and there are all kinds of CIA and Special Forces operations going on. I would call it the beginning of a war.” [Boston Globe, 1/6/2003] The airstrikes, which occur primarily in the southern no-fly zone, are also becoming more strategic, targeting Iraq's surface-to-air missiles, air defense radars, command centers, communications facilities, and fiber-optic cable repeater stations. [Washington Post, 1/15/2003; Time, 11/27/2002; Independent, 11/24/2002] The repeater stations are bombed in order to disrupt the network of fiber-optic cables that transmit military communications between Baghdad and Basra and Baghdad and Nasiriya. “They wanted to neutralize the ability of the Iraqi government to command its forces; to establish control of the airspace over Iraq; to provide air support for Special Operations forces, as well as for the Army and Marine forces that would advance toward Baghdad; and to neutralize Iraq's force of surface-to-surface missiles and suspected caches of biological and chemical weapons,” the New York Times reports in July 2003. [New York Times, 7/20/2003] “We're responding differently,” one Pentagon official explains to Time magazine in November 2002. “[We're] hitting multiple targets when we're fired upon—and they're tending to be more important targets.” [Time, 11/27/2002] Some time after the invasion, a US general reportedly says (see July 17, 2003) at a conference at Nevada's Nellis Air Force Base “that he began taking out assets that could help in resisting an invasion at least six months before war was declared.” [San Francisco Chronicle, 6/19/2005 Sources: Charlie Clements]
People and organizations involved: Britain, United States |
So here we have our leader going before the world preaching peace as an option, but the Air Force is dropping more bombs than ever before. Does that just happen to be a coincidence???
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/...s=aerialAttacks
Disgusting. 
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Berzerker
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topeka, kansas,USA
May 1999
time: 23:37
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Az quote:
The Spanish were mainly after the gold, while their stated reason was to go mainly to "convert the heathen". How's that as an example of a lie. |
They said gold was not a motive? The Church went to convert, the King and his military went for the gold. Where is the lie?
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WRT Taliban, maybe you wouldn't attack, but that's because you'd lose the pretext. |
Which makes the pretext rather important.
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Not all to some, but all to vast majority. It's not a contradiction, but a slight weakening of the original argument. |
If you say so But you're still overstating it, so get weaker with your argument.
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eh? how's that connected to our debate? |
Just showing that many wars are fought by peoples for moral reasons and dont need lies to justify their actions.
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She deserves answers about how he died, and she deserves answers about the general war as much as all of the american people. Not more, or less. |
So what is your problem with her?
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A contract wasn't violated. could you give it a rest? And yes, deeds breaking the rules that result in a good result go unpunished all the times, and even get commended. |
Once the good is realised, it'll be decades before we know if this had a good result. But lying to create a war isn't one of these commendable deeds. And why should we ignore the contract involved here? Weren't you guys arguing that since he signed up, he was bound by a contract?
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Oh, but I don't consider your "helping freedom" back then to be ethical, dear. You weren't "helping freedom", you were helping a bunch of insane people from the dark ages. And it bit you in the ass. |
So why do you see "good" in liberating Iraq but not Afghanistan from the USSR? If this endeavor results in a US city being nuked in 20 years, what will happen to your "good"?
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Yeah, but that's what YOU think. You see, if you want to drown in legalism, and "breaching of contract" etc., there is no real problem with the system here: If congress feels that president messed up, they can vote him off. If they don't and the voter disagrees, they can vote him off, as well. |
Umm...yeah...thats what I think, prove me wrong. So far you said all policians lie. That justifies lying?
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That's rich, coming from a libie. Since when the opinion of the majority of people mattered? |
You asked for the difference between Iraq and Afghanistan wrt pure motives, I said public support is a good indicator of that difference. So I was not placing value on the opinion of the majority, but on the opinion of an overwhelming majority. There's a difference between a fabricated simple majority and an overwhelming majority. Morality may be more safely derived from the latter than the former.
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29-08-2005 18:47
You should contact the Talibans and suggest a trade: Rumsfeld for Bin Ladin 
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