Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by archaeopteryx on October 3, 2012 at 10:40pm

RE: "seemingly-guilty behavior" - I'm not sure I'd want you on my jury --

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Permalink Reply by Tom on October 3, 2012 at 11:00pm

I agree with you that seemingly guilty behavior is not a pretext for a death sentence, but what courses of action are still available when the subject in question cannot be brought before a jury?

Again, not trying to be combative, just thought provoking.

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Permalink Reply by archaeopteryx on October 3, 2012 at 11:14pm

Further investigation, before deciding to kill thousands of people.

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Permalink Reply by Unseen on October 3, 2012 at 11:49pm

You are conveniently forgetting that Saddam blocked "further investigation" at just about every turn. Had WMD's existed we're also talking about thousands of people dying. Remember, he had already demonstrated the will to use them. Had he allowed complete inspections, it's very unlikely the U.S. invasion would have ever happened,

Permalink Reply by Pope OoO (Out of Order) on October 4, 2012 at 1:38pm

Had he allowed complete inspections, it's very unlikely the U.S. invasion would have ever happened

You are conveniently forgetting that invading Iraq was still a mistake. Blaming Saddam for the US efficiently killing all those people unnecessarily contorts reason too much for my taste. I contend that if Gore hadn't lost votes to Nader in 2000, we wouldn't have been so anxious to fuck up Iraq because of their Saddam, and we probably could have taken care of Bin Laden sooner and been more effective with Pakistan/Afghanistan.

But before debating all over the map, since this thread is supposedly about drones, might I just suggest that we could have been using ten times more drones over there to contain the evil Saddam, in addition to executing a more reasonable Pak/Afg response to 911.

Permalink Reply by Unseen on October 4, 2012 at 1:46pm

@Pope Paul

We'll there's the old fallacy of the missing statistic which can be put as "The fork in the road we took turned out badly, therefor the other fork would have been better." We can only guess at what might have happened if we'd done it a different way. We're stuck with what we did do. BUT some believe that in an alternative but parallel universe we did take the other fork.

You're just stuck in the wrong universe.

Permalink Reply by archaeopteryx on October 4, 2012 at 2:53pm

Pablo 0 RE: "we could have been using ten times more drones over there to contain the evil Saddam"

I don't ask this sarcastically, but rather because I really don't know - did we have those back then?

Permalink Reply by Unseen on October 4, 2012 at 3:12pm

I don't know, either. But just think: we might be speaking Persian now if the emperor Darius had had drones.

Permalink Reply by Pope OoO (Out of Order) on October 4, 2012 at 3:30pm

did we have those back then?

Well no, it still would have taken several years, but I'm thinking of all the money and lives lost in our universe, that could have been spent more wisely on drones, instead, over those years.

Permalink Reply by archaeopteryx on October 4, 2012 at 3:45pm

Unseen - you KNOW how reluctant I am to ever, EVER disagree with you, but Darius actually made Aramaic the official language of his empire - just FYI --

Permalink Reply by Unseen on October 4, 2012 at 6:02pm

arch, the proof of how reticent you are to disagree with me is shown by how seldom you do so. While you are right about Darius, since Darius Persian has been adopted as the language of Iran (aka Persia).

Permalink Reply by archaeopteryx on October 4, 2012 at 6:08pm

Really? Iran is aka Persia? Really??!!!

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