Quote Originally Posted by Universal View Post
We are giving the people of Iraq a future of being able to make their own decisions. The Soviets had and supported a system of government where that cannot happen.

If you were locked up in a cage and I let you out, would I be imposing freedom on you? It is not something you could equate with locking you in a cage. In both cases, I am spreading my philosophy, but one involves freedom and the other involves the opposite.
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This analogy does not fit. I am not a history scholar, but it is obvious that American democracy evolved over a very long time and fit the circumstances and then was fought for by the people who believed in it. This is not the case in Iraq. Their culture is not the same and therefore the same processes that we use may not be accepted or even understood. To use your analogy, you can't take a caged animal that has been in there a long time and just open the door and say, there, you're free, be happy. It may not know how to do that, or you may just let something bad in the cage. I don't want to go too far with that, because I don't think the Iraqis were caged animals, or that they were safe, but if they wanted freedom, maybe they should have taken it for themselves. There's a lot of other people who aren't free in the world, are we going to help them next? Or just the ones who happen to live on top of something a few of us can get really rich with? Is that worth American teenagers and who knows how many Iraqis dying for?

You know what is going on in Iraq right now. Does it seem like it is working? That it can possibly work? As low of an opinon as I have of Bush et al, I really still give them credit for lying to us and doing all this for either personal gain or, less likely, cheaper gas for all of us. I expected them to say, OK, Iraq's ours now and so is all the oil, the world is now safe for SUV's. Not that I agree with that, but at least it is comprehensible. If they actually went into Iraq thinking that it would make us safer...well they are way incredibly pitifully stupider than I thought possible.