Status check-- the Middle East

[KevinTheOmnivore]

Originally Posted by mburbank

1,500 American lives and counting. Uncounted thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis dead, amounting to a US sponsored recruitkment drive for terrorists. An official state policy of agression. Unprecedented presidential power up to an including doing away with habeus corpus, allowing the executive branch to simply make people disapear. A plunge from a huge surplus to a record defficit. The declaration, and worse yet, acceptance of a war on a concept, commiting us to a permanent state of war and permanent war powers to the executive branch. Vital damage to the system of checks and balances. The rejection of the geneva convention. Refusal to officially reject torture. The exportation of uncharged prisoners to countries we know will torture them, including official enemies like Syria. A free pass for for the man most responsible for the black market in nuclear weapons technology. etc. etc. etc.

I think you've definitely pointed out some of the obvious negatives to this foreign policy we have here. You left out the part about us basically being seriously misled over WMDs, chem labs, etc.

Some Hawks would still argue that the weapons were found, and that the WMD push had been justified. The evidence they seem to cite for this however comes almost entirely from a book written by one of the editors of a neo-con mag, as well as some DoD memos that have already been discredited for the most part.

The plan B option has become talk about Saddam as the WMD, talk about liberation, talk about freedom, talk about Middle Eastern democracy, etc. etc. I can buy this argument, and while it kinda smarts to basically get lied to, I think the overall ends that we've reached are very promising. As ABC pointed out, we can't take sole credit for all this, nor should we celebrate too soon. And you Max have enumerated some of the unethical problems that continue with this war/occupation.

But as I said, internationalism aside, multi-lateralism aside, warm fuzzy liberalism aside, do the ends (a potentially free and democratic Middle East) justify the means....? Are these truly baby steps, or are we witnessing history in the making?