<p>Atomic fusion, the reason that Clinton did not take the chance to kill Bin Laden was a) Because he wasn't as serious as a terrorist then so why would they have? and b) It wasn't snipers, it was bombs, and if they attacked there would have been unacceptable civilian casualties, so they wouldn't have done it anyway.</p>
<p>Civilian casualties in a war are acceptable. Refer to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and fire bombings of Tokyo and Dresden, to mention a few. That's how you win wars, not by pussyfooting around mosques for 'sensitivity' purposes.</p>
<p>Atomic. I do not have the exact details, but I believe that IMF snipers had a lock on Arafat once, but were pressured by the US not to kill that ****er.</p>
<p>No, Bin Laden in that time was a proven terrorist. This was in the late 90s, after he had already carried out the embassy attacks. Bin Laden did not become the top terrorist on 9/11/01. Clinton just failed to see the many signs that he was before then, but his cabinet didn't. The cabinet tried to get him to go after the terrorists, but Clinton was preoccupied with other issues <em>cough</em> lewinsky <em>cough</em>.</p>
<p>What I heard was that it was snipers. Even if it was bombs, who cares if another TERRORIST (not civllians most likely) would have died. Just recently we didn't think twice about that when we owned Zarqawi.</p>
<p>haha I totally opened this thread thinking it was about the george washington bridge in NY/NJ. . . I'm not even going to touch this iceberg. . .</p>
<p>Clinton should've taken action in yugoslavia.</p>
<p>Liberals today are english teachers of tommrow making 40K a year from a prestigeouse university. Conservatives will be the Doctors, engineers, Pharmacists, vets, lawyers, economists, Businessmen making good money.</p>
<p>actually tenured professors at top universities can make up to 100k a year. I know many liberal engineers. For the most part, all economists are liberal. And there are a lot of liberal lawyers.</p>
<p>wrong, a lot of economists are conservative...</p>
<p>not to mention finances have nothing to do with social views. I'm fiscally conservative but VERY socially liberal. Just because I am pro-choice and anti invasion and anti a religious government does NOT mean that I can't handle money and invest the heck out of it. I also an deciding between graduate school in economics and law school, and my social views have zero impact on any of that.</p>
<p>I can also say the econ dept. at my [very conservative] school is liberal.</p>
<p>Again, you must make a distinction between being fiscally conserative (balanced budget or surplus) and socially conservative. One does not cause the other, and they are not always a pair. </p>
<p>Most economists are fiscally conservative because it is simply the logical thing.</p>
<p>Not to mention, um, how much in debt has bush gotten us?? I always thought one of the ultimate republican goals was to lower taxes and balance the budget?? Apparently those are the only republican views bush does not hold. . .</p>
<p>yeah I meant fiscally conservative, sorry I didn't clarify</p>
<p>they're mostly libertarians, some conservative, but definitely not that many are liberal</p>
<p>Bernard Herrmann makes the best scores!</p>
<p>They never had snipers on Osama...he surrounded himself with somewhere between 10,000-20,000 civilians with lhis house in the dead center of the compound. They had a chance to bomb him, and kill 10,000-20,000 civilians. The US had SEAL teams ready if he ever compromised his position in the compound, such as moving towards the perimeter of the complex, but he did not and the US couldnt send a SEAL team guns blazing into that compound. Keep in mind the US at this point was not at war with him so they couldnt warrant the thousands of casualties that would have resulted.</p>
<p>Damn. :( :(</p>
<p>**** you.</p>
<p>easy two words.</p>
<p>One of by biggest problems with Dubya, is how he's let the military complex get ridiculously out of hand. If people only knew how much money we spend on aspects of the military, many of which are grossly unneccesary. Alexander Hamilton warned against a standing military, which is what the colonies feared in the years leading up to the Revolution. In his farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower (a GENERAL) warned the United States against the growing military-industry complex, that like the one we have today. The US, with help from its military, is moving even closer to a police state. The very same kind of development we saw and were disgusted by in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. There are laws that prevent the military from involving itself internally in the US, but recently the military has tried to side-step these. It has already happened, as the military is involved in border patrol. I'm not suggesting that the military would turn their guns on us, but the way they are function today and into the future, nothing is impossible. While I do understand that the military is neccesary, there are so many different portions that we could cut back, and still be safe and able to defend ourselves to any extent.</p>
<p>I despise the war in Iraq. It's even more unneccesary then Vietnam. Atleast in Vietnam the US had a reason, albeit a flawed, philosophical reason (ie Containment Policy). In Iraq, it's been proven that Bush's reasons for war were false. He wanted Saddam so bad, his administration invented reasons to go to war. If you don't believe it, look at the the evidence the CIA, our personal intelligence gathering ageny, found on Iraq's WMD...there is none:</p>
<p>From "The Sorrows of Empire" by Chalmers Johnson
"From the moment the new Bush administration was formed, this group passionately wanted to go to war with Iraq. Feith [Undersecretary of Defense] had been, in the words of the New York Times, 'data mining' to find an al-Qaeda connection to Saddam Hussein that would justify an American war against him. Wolfowitz [Deputy Secretary of Defense], Feith, and their associates were 'intent on politicizing intelligence to fit their hawkish views.'
It [the Department of Defense] soon found that the chief obstacle to these efforts [wanting to go to war with Iraq] was the Central Intelligence Agency. Its operatives and analysts could find no connection between Iraq and the attacks of September 11. The agency also believed that the secular regime in Iraq was unlikely to have anything to do with the militantly Islamicist al-Qaeda and doubted that Saddam Hussein would supply terrorists beyond his control with any kind of weaponry that could be traced back to him. This difference of opinion soon developed into a full-blown bureaucratic turf war." Sources: New York Times, Canadian Broadcasting Corp.</p>
<p>But yet, here we are, in over our heads in Iraq. And for what reason? Thank you, President Bush, please accept my gratitude.</p>
<p>Yes you are right. The war in Iraq is too costly and has gone on too long. And its not the best target either. Iran would be a much better target to destroy.</p>
<p>Dont forget the oil...even conservatives are saying that now!</p>
<p>No. Iraq is # 7 oil importer to US. You have to be a diehard partisan or incredibly dumb to believe that.</p>
<p>And besides, attacking a country certainly wouldn't help our oil imports any. But then again, we are talking about the Bush administration. Maybe they did think that invading and taking Iraq would give us more oil, even though there's this little thing called OPEC that makes it hell of a lot harder to get oil when you **** them off.</p>
<p>Yea, thats because insurgents have destroyed the main pipelines.</p>
<p>and its not for the oil thats already above ground...its for the oil thats still inside the ground.</p>
<p>do your homework, north sea oil peaked in 1999, saudi arabian oil is believed to have peaked in 2000, venezulean oil soon after that. US oil already peaked in the mid 1990s...meanwhile, only 21 of the 80 oilfields in Iraq have been at least partially developped and only 2,300 wells have been drilled, compared to 1 million in Texas...causing estimates that Iraq can produce 200 billion barrels of oil.</p>
<p>James Paul of the Global Policy Forum calculated that there is $4-5 trillion of oil left in Iraq"</p>
<p>that coupled with an annual 2% growth in demand for oil means that cheap oil is needed by both the companies and the consumers</p>
<p>the US has been attempting to sure up oil producing nations for the past 10 years...Centcom, the Army's command for central asia, expanded to Uzbekistan and Krygystan in 1997 due to concerns of oil supplies from the Caspian region...the US has already send naval squadrons to protect the Strait of Malacca as well as Sao Tome, to sure up Nigerian oil stability.</p>
<p>Also keep in mind that a map from the National Energy Policy Development Group, headed by Dick Cheney, created a national-security blueprint to deal with "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields." Also, a court injunction caused the release of maps displaying all of Iraq's oil fields, pipelines, refineries and a list of suitors for Iraqi oil contracts with comments as to which oil fields each suitor is vying for.</p>