Was the war in Iraq a war of choice?

[best of three?]

best of three?

Syracuse

 9 (75%)

Albany

 1 (8.3%)

Akron

 2 (16.7%)

Total Members Voted: 10

[personally yours]

4. Americans are not "stupider" than Europeans or Canadians or anyone else. Our technology proves it -- even if you grant the fact that much of Americas technology now was created by non-natives, but even more so our entreprenuership, much of which is native. So why does it appear to outsiders that Americans are stupid?

Second of all -- and this is the case because most Americans are still educated in public schools -- most Americans are either ignorant of or deliberately dumbed-down in the subjects that Americans must learn if they are to be bequeathed an empire, history and its sister, geography. This goes beyond the fact that geography bees tend to be won by home-schoolers. When less than 30% of public schooled students can't find Iraq on a map, and when so many fewer than that know that places like Iraq have never been totally conquered by imperialist powers, that can be put down to just how ignorant (not stupid) Americans are when it comes to history and geography.

In casual conversation (called "small talk"), Americans prefer to talk about the weather, sports, jobs, people they both know, or past experiences, especially ones they have in common.  As they grow up, most US citizens are warned not to discuss politics or religion, at least not with people they do not know rather well, because politics and religion are considered controversial topics. By contrast, people in some other cultures are taught to believe that politics and/or religion are good conversation topics, and they may have different ideas about what topics are too "personal" to discuss with others.

Americans do not expect personal involvement from conversational partners. "Small talk" -- without long silences, which provoke uneasiness -- is enough to keep matters going smoothly. It is only with very close friends (or with complete strangers whom they do not expect to see again) that Americans generally expect to discuss personal topics.

People from other countries seek much more personal involvement, as one wants to learn as much as possible about another person and keep open the possibility of developing a relationship of mutual interdependence. The ideal among Americans is to be somewhat verbally adept, speaking in moderate tones. They are generally taught to believe in the "scientific method" of understanding the world around them, as if there is some kind of "truth" about people and nature that can be discovered by means of "objective" inquiry. People from some other countries might pay more attention to the emotional content or the human feeling aspects of a message, without assuming the existence of an "objective truth."

The result is that Americans are likely to view a very articulate person with suspicion. This is because Americans are not intellectually capable of anything more than simple talk. The conclusion that Americans are intellectually inferior is logically reached when you also consider the fact that Americans do not regard argument as a favorite form of interaction. What US citizens regard favorably as "keeping cool" -- that is, not being drawn into an argument, not raising the voice, looking always for the "facts" is nothing else but coldness and lack of humanness. 

[derkaiser]

4. Americans are not "stupider" than Europeans or Canadians or anyone else. Our technology proves it -- even if you grant the fact that much of Americas technology now was created by non-natives, but even more so our entreprenuership, much of which is native. So why does it appear to outsiders that Americans are stupid?

Second of all -- and this is the case because most Americans are still educated in public schools -- most Americans are either ignorant of or deliberately dumbed-down in the subjects that Americans must learn if they are to be bequeathed an empire, history and its sister, geography. This goes beyond the fact that geography bees tend to be won by home-schoolers. When less than 30% of public schooled students can't find Iraq on a map, and when so many fewer than that know that places like Iraq have never been totally conquered by imperialist powers, that can be put down to just how ignorant (not stupid) Americans are when it comes to history and geography.

In casual conversation (called "small talk"), Americans prefer to talk about the weather, sports, jobs, people they both know, or past experiences, especially ones they have in common.  As they grow up, most US citizens are warned not to discuss politics or religion, at least not with people they do not know rather well, because politics and religion are considered controversial topics. By contrast, people in some other cultures are taught to believe that politics and/or religion are good conversation topics, and they may have different ideas about what topics are too "personal" to discuss with others.

Americans do not expect personal involvement from conversational partners. "Small talk" -- without long silences, which provoke uneasiness -- is enough to keep matters going smoothly. It is only with very close friends (or with complete strangers whom they do not expect to see again) that Americans generally expect to discuss personal topics.

People from other countries seek much more personal involvement, as one wants to learn as much as possible about another person and keep open the possibility of developing a relationship of mutual interdependence. The ideal among Americans is to be somewhat verbally adept, speaking in moderate tones. They are generally taught to believe in the "scientific method" of understanding the world around them, as if there is some kind of "truth" about people and nature that can be discovered by means of "objective" inquiry. People from some other countries might pay more attention to the emotional content or the human feeling aspects of a message, without assuming the existence of an "objective truth."

The result is that Americans are likely to view a very articulate person with suspicion. This is because Americans are not intellectually capable of anything more than simple talk. The conclusion that Americans are intellectually inferior is logically reached when you also consider the fact that Americans do not regard argument as a favorite form of interaction. What US citizens regard favorably as "keeping cool" -- that is, not being drawn into an argument, not raising the voice, looking always for the "facts" is nothing else but coldness and lack of humanness. 

This statement is the most baseless and asinine of your series of baseless and asinine assertions; so, it's the only one I'll address.  Americans argue vehemently and informatively  about practically every subject.  However, our arguments are generally channeled into structured forums, with the ideal of argument toward progress -- not merely argument for argument's sake.  We're not the type of people to spent the afternoon sitting the kabob shop arguing about which regime is screwing us over worse.

Our social discourse and argumentation is thorough, appropriately channeled, and the most highly structured and intellectually rigorous in the world.  The fact that it does not often occur often in markets and street corners is irrelevant.

[mamy blue]

We rip Arab countries of their wealth, resources and oil. Their religion is under attack because of us. We kill and murder Islamic people. We compromise their honor and their dignity and dare they utter a single word of protest, they are called terrorists!

There is an Arabic proverb that says "she accused me of having her malady, then snuck away." Besides, terrorism can be commendable and it can be reprehensible. Terrifying an innocent person and terrorizing him is objectionable and unjust, also unjustly terrorizing people is not right. Whereas, terrorizing oppressors and criminals and thieves and robbers is necessary for the safety of people and for the protection of their property. There is no doubt in this. Every state and every civilization and culture has to resort to terrorism under certain circumstances for the purpose of abolishing tyranny and corruption. Every country in the world has its own security system and its own security forces, its own police and its own army. They are all designed to terrorize whoever even contemplates to attack that country or its citizens. The terrorism Arabs practice is of the commendable kind for it is directed at the tyrants and the aggressors and the tyrants, the traitors who commit acts of treason against their own countries and their own faith and their own nation. Terrorizing those and punishing them are necessary measures to straighten things and to make them right.

Tyrants and oppressors who subject the Arab nation to aggression ought to be punished. America heads the list of aggressors against Muslims. The recurrence of aggression against Muslims everywhere is proof enough. For over half a century, Muslims in Palestine have been slaughtered and assaulted and robbed of their honor and of their property. Their houses have been blasted, their crops destroyed. And the strange thing is that any act on their part to avenge themselves or to lift the injustice befalling them causes great agitation in the United Nations which hastens to call for an emergency meeting only to convict the victim and to censure the wronged and the tyrannized whose children have been killed and whose crops have been destroyed and whose farms have been pulverized ...

...

America started it and retaliation and punishment should be carried out following the principle of reciprocity, especially when women and children are involved. Through history, American has not been known to differentiate between the military and the civilians or between men and women or adults and children. Those who threw atomic bombs and used the weapons of mass destruction against Nagasaki and Hiroshima were the Americans. Can the bombs differentiate between military and women and infants and children? America has no religion that can deter it from exterminating whole peoples. America has no shame. ... The worst thieves in the world today and the worst terrorists are the Americans. Nothing could stop them except perhaps retaliation in kind.

"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people, and the West in general, into an unbearable hell and a choking life."
Osama bin Laden, October, 2001 (quoted in NewsMax.com 2/1/02)

[signaturebear]

To many people, it may seem odd whom this is coming from, but I think it deserves a little bit of attention on their part,

[Vera]

I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people, and the West in general, into an unbearable hell and a choking life.

Osama bin Laden, October, 2001

[6flags]

Nice work - however, this part of the diagram is not that clear what exactly means ..

Maybe I'm not being paranoid enough, but I don't think it means anything sinister.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiIyI6ugmUM&mode=related&search=

[Victoria Principal]

Nice work - however, this part of the diagram is not that clear what exactly means ..

Maybe I\'m not being paranoid enough, but I don\'t think it means anything sinister.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiIyI6ugmUM&mode=related&search=

Here Rosie literally rapes the stupid little Elisabeth

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE_l8QYAWZM

[height]

Nice work - however, this part of the diagram is not that clear what exactly means ..

Maybe I'm not being paranoid enough, but I don't think it means anything sinister.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58h0LjdMry0&mode=related&search=

[croatan]

Interesting video indeed!

[n i c o l e]

Which is closer to dying: Osama bin Laden or the CIA's effort to catch him? Nothing has characterized the fruitlessness of the hunt for the al-Qaeda leader so much as the recurrent — and mostly inaccurate — reports that he is seriously ailing, or even at death's door. In 2002, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said bin Laden had kidney disease, and that he had required a dialysis machine when he lived in Afghanistan. That same year, the FBI's top counterterrorism official, Dale Watson, said, "I personally think he is probably not with us anymore." Since then, of course, bin Laden has appeared on multiple videos looking healthier than ever.


 
Now the CIA has produced a report saying that bin Laden has long-term kidney disease and may have only months to live, two U.S. officials familiar with the report told TIME. The agency ostensibly managed to get the names of some of the medications bin Laden is taking. One U.S. official familiar with the report, which came out between six and nine months ago, says it concluded, "Based on his current pharmaceutical intake, [we] would expect that he has no more than six to 18 months to live and impending kidney failure." That prognosis, along with some on-the-ground intelligence and a well-aimed Hellfire missile, will get you a dead terrorist leader. Close watchers of the al-Qaeda terror network find such reports inherently unreliable. "It's trying to make a diagnosis from thousands of miles away with only fragments of the medical chart," says Paul Pillar, former top analyst and deputy director of the CIA's counterterrorism center, who now teaches at Georgetown University. Says Frances Fragos Townsend, who stepped down last November as chief of President George W. Bush's Homeland Security Council, "I've read all the same conflicting reports [on bin Laden's health] that people have talked to you about. I never found one set of reporting more persuasive than another."

The CIA, for its part, is disavowing the claims attributed to the report. "I have found no one here familiar with this alleged report or the analytic line it supposedly conveys," says Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman. "The fact that anonymous sources attribute views to the CIA is not, by itself, reason to believe the agency actually holds those views," he says. If bin Laden really is dying, the news would doubtless be greeted with some ambivalence. On the one hand, his demise is what the U.S. government has been fervently trying to hasten — since before 9/11. But death by kidney disease is not exactly what it had in mind. "Wouldn't that be a tragic situation if, with all this effort, bin Laden died without it happening at the hands of coalition forces?" says one current senior counterterrorism official. Given the reliability of past long-distance diagnoses, however, and the continuing threat al-Qaeda poses around the world, that may be the least of America's worries.