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AyHyperbole
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Posted: Mon Sep 28th, 2009 09:53 pm |
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Ronson wrote: AyHyperbole wrote: And Bush did, in fact, tell Jacques Chirac what he was thinking. Bush called Chirac, asked to appeal to their "common faith," reminded Chirac of the story of Gog and Magog, said he believed Gog and Magog were operating in the Middle East, and then he told Chirac (in Chirac's paraphrase), "This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins."
Chirac didn't actually know what the heck he was talking about and had to have someone in his staff research "Gog and Magog."
I don't think this is something as banal as a family feud between the Bushes and the Husseins. I think Bush literally felt he was part of an ultimate battle between good and evil.
Hmmm... OK. I always assumed Bush's motives were personal, because Hussein tried to kill his father, or because he wanted to finish the job his father started so the Bush family will go down better in history. If he was telling Chirac he had a "Gog and Magog" reason for the invasion then that's plain spooky. However, even if true, this doesn't translate well into Bush secretly sacrificing innocent lives for a larger cause for God. If he thought he was launching the war on behalf of God then he must have also believed his secret 9/11 sacrifices of innocent people were quite visible to God. It doesn't wash.
There's an awful lot of talk in that Bible about sacrifice. Like I said, I don't think it's necessarily unchristian to sacrifice ten lives to save a hundred. I don't know if there's a specific piece of Scripture that addresses the point, but I do believe - in fact, I'm certain - that there's a certain brand of Christians who could simultaneously be very pious and conclude that there are situations where the few must be put in harm's way to protect the many.
"Osama bin Laden is irrelevant. I believe Bush wanted a final struggle between Christianity and Islam - not a petty war between America and Afghanistan. And I believe Israel was well-aware at how much that benefited them. I made an Internet posting in late 2001 protesting the Afghanistan war, in which I said "I hope America gets its nose bloodied in this war. Because if it's too easy for us, there will be another. And another. And another. We won't stop until someone finally gives us a bloody nose." "
By "bloodied," you mean you hoped Americans would die in great numbers?
I hoped that Americans would die in numbers sufficient that the conflict would end there. Better 2,000 dead in Afghanistan than 5,000 dead in Iraq. Better 5,000 dead in Iraq than 50,000 dead in Iran. Better 50,000 dead in Iran than World War 3.
Seems like Iraq was the conflict that bloodied our nose enough to stop us. We didn't have the will for any more than that - thank God.
And, also, frankly, it was obvious to me - and should have been obvious to anyone with half a brain in their heads - that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would die if we invaded that country. I am not the kind of ultranationalist jingoist who thinks the life of 10,000 volunteer soldiers is worth more than the life of a half million women and children - because the former group is comprised of Americans. If ten thousand Americans had died in Afghanistan, it's very possible that those half-million Iraqi civilians would be alive today.
There's really no "ethical calculus" that works neatly, here. What's the "exchange rate" between an American soldier, an American civilian, an allied soldier, an enemy soldier, a foreign civilian?
Obviously, you think the American civilian is utterly sacred. And why wouldn't you? You are one. So's your wife and nearly everyone you care about. But one thing's clear - some version of that "ethical calculus" is floating around in Bush's head, and the guy was not at all afraid to kill.
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WingedBeast
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Posted: Tue Sep 29th, 2009 01:31 am |
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For my two cents on this. I don't have any problem thinking of Bush or his administration as willing to sacrifice American lives if it meant creating a justification a war he wanted to finish for his daddy.
I just don't think either he or they have the organizational capacity to do it or keep it hidden this long.
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Ronson
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Posted: Wed Sep 30th, 2009 04:41 pm |
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AyHyperbole wrote: I hoped that Americans would die in numbers sufficient that the conflict would end there. Better 2,000 dead in Afghanistan than 5,000 dead in Iraq. Better 5,000 dead in Iraq than 50,000 dead in Iran. Better 50,000 dead in Iran than World War 3.
Seems like Iraq was the conflict that bloodied our nose enough to stop us. We didn't have the will for any more than that - thank God.
I thought Bush was sacrificing people for God, though. If that's the case, who is to say how many should be sacrificed? Bush alone. A bloodied nose wouldn't matter.
And, also, frankly, it was obvious to me - and should have been obvious to anyone with half a brain in their heads - that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would die if we invaded that country. I am not the kind of ultranationalist jingoist who thinks the life of 10,000 volunteer soldiers is worth more than the life of a half million women and children - because the former group is comprised of Americans. If ten thousand Americans had died in Afghanistan, it's very possible that those half-million Iraqi civilians would be alive today.
All I can say here is that I have always considered the Iraq invasion to be unfounded and indefensible. Not so with Afghanistan.
There's really no "ethical calculus" that works neatly, here. What's the "exchange rate" between an American soldier, an American civilian, an allied soldier, an enemy soldier, a foreign civilian?
Obviously, you think the American civilian is utterly sacred. And why wouldn't you? You are one. So's your wife and nearly everyone you care about. But one thing's clear - some version of that "ethical calculus" is floating around in Bush's head, and the guy was not at all afraid to kill.
Again, the U.S. president must place American citizens on top of his priority list. That is his job. Any deviation from that is traitorous. Likewise, I expect the rulers of other countries to do the same regarding their citizens. As far as any "ethical calculus" to figure how many foreign civilians is equal to a single American civilian, who knows. This can only be determined by the circumstances. But I do know one thing: George Herbert Walker Bush bent over backwards to avoid foreign civilian casualties during the Gulf War. It was an unprecendented approach. From Wikipedia:
Gulf War civilian deaths:
About 3,664 Iraqi civilians killed.
2 Israeli civilians killed, 230 injured
1 Saudi civilian killed, 65 injured [8]
Around 1,000 Kuwaiti civilians killed during the Iraqi occupation in addition to 300,000 refugees.
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Ronson
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Posted: Thu Oct 1st, 2009 06:09 pm |
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An afterthought here...
During WWII and prior, killing foreign civilians of hostile countries during war time was not only inevitable, they were often a target. Nazis were bombing London, Brits and Yanks were bombing Dresden, Russians were bombing Berlin, Japan was bombing Shangai and finally Truman obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All civilian targets. Exactly when sensibilities about this strategy changed, I don't know. Probably during Vietnam, after images of civilians being killed were broadcast on American TV.
I certainly am among the modern morality that says civilians should never be targeted during war time. However, I am not averse to a war simply because foreign civilians will be killed. There is no way to completely avoid it - especially when an enemy intentionally uses civilians as a cover (like what Hamas was doing in the Gaza Strip during its last conflict with Israel, actually firing its rockets from elementary schools).
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Cool Spot
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Posted: Sat Oct 3rd, 2009 03:50 pm |
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Evelyn wrote:
"Motive is actually the easiest one to deal with. My suspicion is that agents of Israel, in cahoots with a small group inside the CIA or some other US government, plus some American citizens not in government but powerful in NYC, planned this event. Their motive was to inflame American opinion against Muslims in the Middle East, in order to get the US to fight its war against Iraq. And it worked out rather well.
Alright, it's a good chance that I don't understand the context of this thread and that people are just playing around. I have probably missed something, and I am taking this thread quasi-seriously and not seeing its tongue-in-cheek aspects. Maybe you are all lampooning some of the right-wing anti-Obama conspiracies. I probably don't know the board history so well. I grant that possibility because there's no way anyone can rationally hold to this conspiracy theory argument.
We know what brought down the World Trade Center. It wasn't some secret American/Israeli conspiracy designed to do the above. A terrorist group based in Afghanistan, protected by their government, with extensive financing out of Saudi Arabia, engaged in plot that took several years worth of pre-operational planning. They executed it in Sept, 2001. The motive was to strike a blow at the United States to show the Islamist world that (a) you can stand up to the US and live to tell about it, and (b) strike at the US for their support for Israel.
That is what happened.
There were a lot of lucky hunches on that day. All 4 airline flights that crashed were eerily, inexplicably low on passengers. Numbers like 44 or 55 at prime time on a perfect day for flying.
No, there weren't. Why is 44 or 55 inexplicably low? What are the normal numbers for an 8 am flight during a recession? All of these hunches are data mining in attempt to find anomalies to support a crazy conspiracy theory.
The method of collapse of the 3 buildings in NYC has never been fully explained, particularly the building that wasn't hit by an airplane.
Yes it has. Jet fuel from the crash of the planes ignited with flammable material in the towers causing superheated temperatures. This caused the steel girders of the support structure of the towers to sag and weaken. Eventually, the truss structures failed and collapsed, each floor pounding on top of the one below it like a domino effect, sending it crashing.
The building that wasn't hit by the airplane was weakened by all of the shock waves and tremors and it, too, eventually collapsed.
Reasons for suspicion of the government-sponsored official conspiracy theory involving 19 amateurs from Saudi Arabia? Hell, yes.
They were not amateurs. They spent years planning this operation, not to mention other aborted operations. There are certainly amateur terrorists operating in western nations today, but the Al Qaeda ones on Sept 11 were not among them.
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Evelyn
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Posted: Sun Oct 4th, 2009 03:29 am |
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The building that wasn't hit by the airplane was weakened by all of the shock waves and tremors and it, too, eventually collapsed.
Absolutely untenable. First of all, as any number of videos will show, there was no big shock at ground level when Buildings 1 and 2 collapsed because they came down as talcum-fine powder. That in itself is almost inexplicable. When the space shuttle blew up and fell into the ocean, it came down in a chunk big enough to still have astronauts strapped in their seats, to be found some months later in the ocean. But when a building falls down it turns to dust? No earthquake has ever done to a building what those 2 airplanes did. The huge Kobe earthquake tipped over a freeway, but nothing turned to dust.
And if two buildings coming down as if demolished is enough to cause one across the street to collapse, how is it possible that building demolitions are ever possible in urban areas. My God, a building n the next block might implode from the shock wave! Clearly, this is not the case. The official reports made no such claims either. They said a fire in the building caused it to collapse from the bottom up. (different from how the two main buildings collapsed.)
"There were a lot of lucky hunches on that day. All 4 airline flights that crashed were eerily, inexplicably low on passengers. Numbers like 44 or 55 at prime time on a perfect day for flying."
No, there weren't. Why is 44 or 55 inexplicably low? What are the normal numbers for an 8 am flight during a recession? All of these hunches are data mining in attempt to find anomalies to support a crazy conspiracy theory.
This is not data mining. These are questions that occurred to me within a week of 9/11/01, and which have still not been answered coherently. Spetember 2001 was not a recession. And I have been on many flights over the past 20 years, and never, ever, has there been anything like 75% of the seats empty, not even on red-eye flights. All four flights just happened to have numbers that are extraordinarily low. They also happened to have flight lists that never contained the names of any of the terrorists, even in the first few days afterwards. They also had people on them who had long,uninterupted cellphone conversations from 30,000 feet at 450 miles per hour. There are anomolies.
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met
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Posted: Sun Oct 4th, 2009 03:40 am |
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Ev, i happen to know Cool Spot is/was a geek ... and the technology sector experienced a sort of "recession" starting around spring 2001 when the Y2k issue had finally been resolved and simultaneously the dot.com bubble finally burst
____________________
“Hum tum ek kamre meins band ho, aur chaabi kho jaaye”
-from Bobby
o Dir. Raj Kapoor. 1973. R.K. Films Ltd.
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Evelyn
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Posted: Sun Oct 4th, 2009 04:10 am |
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Ah, that makes sense. I remember that there was a short but sharp recession as a consequence of 9/11, but the dot.com bubble bursting slipped my mind.
I doubt that it explains 4 airplanes flying at 25% of capacity on a beautiful fall morning, though.
Flight 11 was a Boeing 767-223ER. This plane holds at least 158 passengers. There were 81 passengers and 11 crew. (About 30% capacity) Fl. 175 had 56 passengers on a Boeing 767-222. The pentagon plane ( fl. 77) had 58 passengers on a Boeing 757-223, and the flight 93 had 37 on a Boeing 757-222. All less than 25% of capacity.
Last edited on Sun Oct 4th, 2009 04:46 am by Evelyn
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AyHyperbole
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Posted: Sun Oct 4th, 2009 08:41 pm |
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Cool Spot wrote:
The method of collapse of the 3 buildings in NYC has never been fully explained, particularly the building that wasn't hit by an airplane.
Yes it has. Jet fuel from the crash of the planes ignited with flammable material in the towers causing superheated temperatures. This caused the steel girders of the support structure of the towers to sag and weaken. Eventually, the truss structures failed and collapsed, each floor pounding on top of the one below it like a domino effect, sending it crashing.
The building that wasn't hit by the airplane was weakened by all of the shock waves and tremors and it, too, eventually collapsed.
Actually, NIST, the government agency in charge of explaining the collapse of 7 WTC, specificallyfound that it wasn't weakened by shock waves and tremors.
NIST found, instead, that it collapsed due to a conventional fire - which would make it the only steel-framed skyscraper in human history to do so.
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Henry Sidgwick
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Posted: Sun Oct 4th, 2009 10:01 pm |
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AyHyperbole wrote: Cool Spot wrote:
The method of collapse of the 3 buildings in NYC has never been fully explained, particularly the building that wasn't hit by an airplane.
Yes it has. Jet fuel from the crash of the planes ignited with flammable material in the towers causing superheated temperatures. This caused the steel girders of the support structure of the towers to sag and weaken. Eventually, the truss structures failed and collapsed, each floor pounding on top of the one below it like a domino effect, sending it crashing.
The building that wasn't hit by the airplane was weakened by all of the shock waves and tremors and it, too, eventually collapsed.
Actually, NIST, the government agency in charge of explaining the collapse of 7 WTC, specificallyfound that it wasn't weakened by shock waves and tremors.
NIST found, instead, that it collapsed due to a conventional fire - which would make it the only steel-framed skyscraper in human history to do so.
I would also add that NIST abandoned FEMA's truss failure theory back in 2004.
____________________
The "FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.”
--Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI
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