I brushed up the thread title and here's the bat signal for all the peeps involved in the last tangent. @Moishe @onefineesq @Timon19 @dapip @Cascarino's Pizzeria @JohnR I'm sure I've missed a few, but you're all Republicans to me
I have more confidence that the regularly unscheduled appearance of 'all things drones' will end up here.
Ok, in an effort to spur this bitch... Obama should be tried in The Hague alongside W, Cheney, Kerry, and Hillary for war crimes. Toss in Bill and Albright for killing 500000 Iraqi kids, and we have a party.
If no war crimes court tried & convicted Kissinger 45 years ago, the above is an absolute pipe dream.
Strangely....GRIMES declined to comment. HAIL GRIMES!!! That would never fly....witnesses for the defense would be Bush, Cheney and Rummy. Sarah Palin as a character witness would be the clincher.
There's still time. That f#cker is still alive. Knowing his schmoozing ability, he'll probably be in Putin's box at the World Cup with Pele, Assad and Jack Warner.
If the two are Libya and Yemen it is hardly safe to say they were functioning states before, either. Yemen's civil war is just the resumption of hostilities that have gone on for centuries, while Qaddafi suppressed his internal conflicts rather than building a pluralistic economy to solve them.
That's a cop-out. Yemen is beyond a disaster and Libya is proper-********ed as well. They went from highest per-capita income in Africa to complete ********ing mess, all because the French didn't want the gold dinar to replace the franc. That's an even bigger cop-out. That's a line you usually hear out of neo-cons. Neither of these things, which are true, mean that they should have had their leader violently deposed on behalf of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (and whatever else they call themselves), or starved into oblivion.
If you think trade is going to solve the problems in the middle east, I've got two boroughs and a bridge to sell you.
No, I don't pretend to know what will solve the problems of the Middle East, and I'd like to not make them OUR problem (and in so doing make MORE problems). THAT'S what's naive. That we can "solve" their problems, like some goddamn white knight. By saying "trade with all", I mean I prefer to trade in goods and services with willing parties, rather than armies with unwilling ones. If no one in the Middle East wants to trade with us, that's their decision.
I'm hardly an expert on this area of the world, and perhaps I'm not remembering it correctly, but as I recall, Khadafy threatened (and apparently fully intended) to massacre a significant portion of the population of Benghazi for breaking away from his regime. It was then that NATO came to the aid of the rebel population in the form of arms and air strikes. Tripoli soon fell to the rebels, and Khadafy's escape convoy was apprehended, with Khadafy then murdered by rebel forces, not NATO forces. The aftermath is a different story, but up to that point I'm not sure how it should have been handled differently. Certainly the NATO intervention to protect the people of Benghazi was a good thing, IMO. I suppose Khadafy could have been airlifted to safety at some point before his escape attempt, but did he really deserve rescue and protection at the possible expense of the rescuer's lives? Would he even have agreed to that?