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Author Topic:   Is US Establishing An Islamic Theocracy In Iraq?
jar
Member (Idle past 394 days)
Posts: 34026
From: Texas!!
Joined: 04-20-2004


Message 46 of 58 (276117)
01-05-2006 2:27 PM
Reply to: Message 44 by nator
01-05-2006 2:19 PM


Last I checked, nobody in the US is requirred by law to be christian, nor follow any exclusively Christian tenets.
Doesn't that go against the very first commandment?
No, not really. The first commandment does not preclude other gods, it only says that they cannot be superior to the Judaic one. It's an interesting subject and I'd love to see a discussion on it, but it's really OT here. Maybe a PNT?

Aslan is not a Tame Lion

This message is a reply to:
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Theodoric
Member
Posts: 9076
From: Northwest, WI, USA
Joined: 08-15-2005
Member Rating: 3.7


Message 47 of 58 (276137)
01-05-2006 3:39 PM
Reply to: Message 42 by Tal
01-05-2006 1:47 PM


While the Iraq constitution has verbage in there of God and religion, so does the US constitution
NO
much like the US based its laws on Christain law.
and NO
Much of US law is based on English common law, the roots of which go back to pre-christian roman and tribal laws.
Thomas Jefferson made it very clear that the constitution was not based on christian law.
Yes really, the Sunnis ruled Iraq.
While technically true, it is playing with the facts. Yes the Baath party was dominated by people that were Sunnis. These were secular, non-religious Sunnis. You are trying to intimate that the Sunnis in power were the same as religious Sunnis. Not true.
This message has been edited by Theodoric, 01-05-2006 03:14 PM

Barb's Site
Exposing the radical right with facts

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Silent H
Member (Idle past 5820 days)
Posts: 7405
From: satellite of love
Joined: 12-11-2002


Message 48 of 58 (276138)
01-05-2006 3:42 PM
Reply to: Message 42 by Tal
01-05-2006 1:47 PM


While the Iraq constitution has verbage in there of God and religion, so does the US constitution.
Remind me where in the US constitution there is verbiage regarding God and the Xian religion? I'm not saying there definitely isn't, but I don't know of any and I just browsed through it again and didn't find any. Are you thinking of the Declaration of Independence?
This will pretty much shut any argument down about Iraq being an Arab theocracy. It is a representative republic. Mullah's cannot come to power just because they have spiritual authority. They must be voted in by the poeple.
Things can be different than what their constitution's suggest. As it is this is able to support a theocracy, which as jar pointed out can still be democratic.
Given the demographics of Iraq it will be easy enough to get fundamentalist Islamic candidates in positions of power. Will it make any real difference if you have an executive officer and legislative block that is like the current leader of Iran, just because they got voted in?
They are basing their laws on Islamic law, much like the US based its laws on Christain law.
??? What is Xian law? Where can I find it? And more importantly can you point me to the document from any of the founding fathers which shows them discussing that as their formulating plan?
It has not, except for maybe in your mind
You have to admit it is more of a possibility now, than it was pre-invasion.

holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

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Buzsaw
Inactive Member


Message 49 of 58 (276254)
01-05-2006 11:43 PM
Reply to: Message 27 by Silent H
01-04-2006 10:24 AM


Re: The war an insignificant issue?
holmes writes:
Yes, it is true that there was supporters from both sides in congress, and I believe a slim majority within the population, for the war.
I wouldn't call 63% overall approval rating a very slim majority and I'm not sure but what the public approval of the war itself was not higher than that.
holmes writes:
That does not make the decision a correct one, nor does it remove responsibility from GWBs shoulders. That's the point of leadership. He himself states that he alone has to make decisions even if they are unpopular, well that means that he does not get to say his decisions are right simply because they were popular. If it goes kablooey, then it is his error for not checking his facts and making the unpopular decision not to go to war.
That does not make it GWB's war either, nor does it place all the responsibility on GWB's shoulders. I believe it was the Clinton admin which downsized the effectiveness of the nation's intelligence.
holmes writes:
No one was pushing this except a small group of neocons before Bush pressed the issue, and most of the people outside the top administrators were being fed bad information by a bad system which he himself presided over and had responsibility for making sure worked properly.
The bad information by a bad system was also presided over by Clinton. How, in the relatively brief time he'd been in office was GWB able to have anything different than was known by the previous admin, and with a deficient CIA intelligence which he inherited how was he to know a whole lot more? It takes time to overhaul and ratchet up a department as complex as the CIA.
holmes writes:
I agree that everyone who supported this war ought to be feeling some heat for their support. The evidence is in and it was botched. ............the person who spearheaded the campaign to divert resources to this new conflict, that oversaw the system that provided the evidence which made the case, and the person who oversaw the system which did NOT run the invasion correctly, was only one man............
One man appointed the overseers of the respective departments. One man said, do it, after determination that he had the support of the majority, both in and out of government. The rest was dependent on the intelligence the government had and how well planned and implemented the effort went. Mistakes were made, but remarkably few casualties were suffered during the suberbly planned invasion and even over all so far in the war, compared to previous wars.
Imo, it was not a mistake to take some kind of action, given the saber rattling and the then perceived WMD threat and given that 9/11 was fresh reality of danger from Islamic militant enemies everywhere of the US.
I believe it would have been nice to have limited the action to air strikes on terrorist hotspots as Israel does.
holmes writes:
If not for him, this would have gone very very differently.
Says the Monday quarterback from his easy chair. Nobody knows how badly things could have gotten, both overseas and at home, had nothing been done. Maybe little. Maybe horrendous disaster....tough to call.
holmes writes:
I believe you are correct about Kennedy and others that began other wars. The only one I'd leave out is Roosevelt (WW2). That stands as a great counterpoint to what happened here. We stayed out of a war, which by rights we probably should have been engaging in long before. Once attacked we stayed on target and did not divert resources to other wars.
Uhhuh, and not to mention that the man had some intelligence of the threat to Hawaii and invasion long before getting hit. Was it bogus? He evidently either thought so or was neglegant in response.
Other wars? That was the WWII which involved many global areas. This is the War On Terror, involving many global areas.
The rest of your post applies to other topics which I don't have time for at this time and which would lead off topic.

Gravity is God's glue that holds his universe together.

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
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Buzsaw
Inactive Member


Message 50 of 58 (276256)
01-06-2006 12:02 AM
Reply to: Message 43 by nator
01-05-2006 2:16 PM


Re: The war an insignificant issue?
Shrafinator writes:
"the whole nation believed the administration when it said that Iraq ha vWMD.
Make that, 'Much of the world believed Iraq had WMDs and the Turks KNEW it.'
AbE: Fix goofup for not previewing.
This message has been edited by buzsaw, 01-06-2006 12:06 AM

Gravity is God's glue that holds his universe together.

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Replies to this message:
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nator
Member (Idle past 2170 days)
Posts: 12961
From: Ann Arbor
Joined: 12-09-2001


Message 51 of 58 (276299)
01-06-2006 7:54 AM
Reply to: Message 50 by Buzsaw
01-06-2006 12:02 AM


Re: The war an insignificant issue?
quote:
Make that, 'Much of the world believed Iraq had WMDs and the Turks KNEW it
Care to back that up with some evidence, there, buz?
Are you still referring to the Kurds, whp are an Iraqi ethnic group in northern Iraq, as the "Turks", who have nothing to do with the Kurds and live in Turkey?
This message has been edited by schrafinator, 01-06-2006 07:56 AM

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nator
Member (Idle past 2170 days)
Posts: 12961
From: Ann Arbor
Joined: 12-09-2001


Message 52 of 58 (276301)
01-06-2006 7:59 AM
Reply to: Message 50 by Buzsaw
01-06-2006 12:02 AM


I think you missed these questions, buz
quote:
The plus side of the wars is that after the 9/11 wakeup call, our presence in the regions of Iraq and Afganistan has been a needed deterant to militant Islamic expansion in the region and to terrorism here in the states.
Buzsaw, how large was the militant Islamic presence in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was in power?
How large is it now?
Who was governor of Texas when he invited members of the Taliban to his state and treated them as honored guests?

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Silent H
Member (Idle past 5820 days)
Posts: 7405
From: satellite of love
Joined: 12-11-2002


Message 53 of 58 (276309)
01-06-2006 8:40 AM
Reply to: Message 49 by Buzsaw
01-05-2006 11:43 PM


Re: The war an insignificant issue?
I wouldn't call 63% overall approval rating a very slim majority and I'm not sure but what the public approval of the war itself was not higher than that.
If it was anything above 53-55% I will agree that it was more than a slim majority. Was support for the war itself 63%? And is there a track of approval over time?
I'm totally open to evidence on this. I'd be interested in approval ratings for such an idea from before, and up till now. Break downs by state might also be interesting.
That does not make it GWB's war either, nor does it place all the responsibility on GWB's shoulders. I believe it was the Clinton admin which downsized the effectiveness of the nation's intelligence.
Okay, I can accept that by your definition no war can be laid on any president's head. That is an opinion and we can agree to disagree on that. What I am saying is that I do place it on the head of the leader who has the call, and am pointing to words by Bush himself which suggest he should be taking responsibility.
The Clinton accusation is without merit. That was an accusation made early on, and the evidence is in that it is not true. Whatever problems did occur under his admin, they were not ones which undercut Bush. Bush specifically shifted resources away from terrorism in order to fight porn, as well as fostering a chain of information which isolated good intel. In case you don't know he is doing it again.
I might add that Clinton's intel problems have NOTHING to do with Iraq.
The bad information by a bad system was also presided over by Clinton...
It is on record that the Bush administration received accurate info regarding the threat of AQ, and it was dismissed by Bush and Ashcroft. They also diverted resources to fight porn. I think this is rather obviously huge steps in the wrong direction.
I should also add that CIA is not the only intel agency. If you read the Senate's findings on intel errors, it showed that the big problem was Bush's heads accepting CIA conclusions using faulty logic OVER the conclusions of other US intel agencies.
The "surprise" of misinfo is mainly from those at the top (or anyone else) who relied only on cherry picked CIA data.
The rest was dependent on the intelligence the government had and how well planned and implemented the effort went. Mistakes were made, but remarkably few casualties were suffered during the suberbly planned invasion and even over all so far in the war, compared to previous wars.
Unfortunately, as I have pointed to above, intel of the govt is different than what Bush was producing for public consumption. And the intel that other agencies had was available in some public forums outside the US. That's why some... like me and schraf... did not make a mistake.
The execution was fine, the planning was horrible. The best it has been described as (by its own commander) is "catastrophic success" suggesting that it went so well it ended up producing bad results. The casualties are less, but this was a war against an infinitely inferior enemy than we ever faced before.
Unfortunately every innocent dead person is really dead, and did not advance the security it was argued would result. And more to the point, it has resulted in massive costs to the US and a diversion of military power away from the primary fight against the people that attacked us.
it was not a mistake to take some kind of action
Ahhhhhhh, and that is not something that I (and maybe not even schraf) would have been against. Saddam was not sabre rattling (not sure where that came from), but actions of some kind would have been called for to get inspectors back in as well as efforts to actively suppress WMD ambitions (which everyone agrees he had).
The criticism is only that overt war was the worst solution with predictable outcomes. Many critics predicted the problems that could emerge and in fact they have emerged. The predictions of success made by war supporters have all gone wrong.
Except that Hussein is not in power, and Iraqis have a chance at running their nation. I agree that is great, just not great enough and solved none of our security issues.
Says the Monday quarterback from his easy chair. Nobody knows how badly things could have gotten, both overseas and at home, had nothing been done. Maybe little. Maybe horrendous disaster....tough to call.
WRONG. We suggested the outcomes from an invasion and they have come true. Our assessment of the available data has been vindicated.
And from what we have learned things could not have gotten as bad as was predicted by war proponents. There were no WMDs and there were no connections to AQ. He didn't even have a military capable of threatening neighbors (which I have already shown the Bush administration itself stated before 911).
This really did produce no benefits, and indeed has resulted in the problems we suggested. Armchair general criticism starts falling away at that point.
Although I guess I am assuming we agree on the state of data at this point. You do agree that there were no WMDs or viable WMD capabilities in Iraq, as well as no military capability, right?
Uhhuh, and not to mention that the man had some intelligence of the threat to Hawaii and invasion long before getting hit. Was it bogus? He evidently either thought so or was neglegant in response.
If R knew of Pearl harbor I would have held him accountable for that decision. However that would not have changed whether it was "his war". Pearl Harbor was set to coincide with a declaration of war from Japan. Thus we were forced into war by the Japanese regardless of PH. Likewise Germany declared war on us.
I do think WW2 was a significantly different war than most within US history.

holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

This message is a reply to:
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Minnemooseus
Member
Posts: 3941
From: Duluth, Minnesota, U.S. (West end of Lake Superior)
Joined: 11-11-2001
Member Rating: 10.0


Message 54 of 58 (276335)
01-06-2006 10:07 AM


A couple of related old topics
War and Majority, started 1/25/03.
Poll: Should U.S. etc. go to war against Iraq, a spin-off topic also started 1/25/03.
Iraq war opinions from almost 3 years ago.
Moose
ps: Both topics are closed to any futher replies, and Adminnemooseus thinks it best that they stay that way.

  
Tal
Member (Idle past 5677 days)
Posts: 1140
From: Fort Bragg, NC
Joined: 12-29-2004


Message 55 of 58 (276349)
01-06-2006 10:52 AM
Reply to: Message 47 by Theodoric
01-05-2006 3:39 PM


Thomas Jefferson made it very clear that the constitution was not based on christian law.
The three branches of the U.S. Government: Judicial, Legislative, Executive
At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Madison proposed the plan to divide the central government into three branches. He discovered this model of government from the Perfect Governor, as he read Isaiah 33:22
“For the LORD is our judge,
the LORD is our lawgiver,
the LORD is our king;
He will save us.”
“ Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty, as well as the privilege and interest of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.” John Jay (In case you didn't know, he was the US's first Chief Justice) Source: October 12, 1816. The Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay, Henry P. Johnston, ed., (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), Vol. IV, p. 393.
“ The general principles upon which the Fathers achieved independence were the general principals of Christianity . I will avow that I believed and now believe that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God.”
” “[July 4th] ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty.”
-John Adams in a letter written to Abigail on the day the Declaration was approved by Congress
“Why is it that, next to the birthday of the Savior of the world, your most joyous and most venerated festival returns on this day [the Fourth of July]?" “Is it not that, in the chain of human events, the birthday of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birthday of the Savior? That it forms a leading event in the progress of the Gospel dispensation? Is it not that the Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the foundation of the Redeemer's mission upon earth? That it laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity"?
-- John Quincy Adams, 1837, at the age of 69, when he delivered a Fourth of July speech at Newburyport, Massachusetts.
Now onto
While technically true, it is playing with the facts. Yes the Baath party was dominated by people that were Sunnis. These were secular, non-religious Sunnis. You are trying to intimate that the Sunnis in power were the same as religious Sunnis. Not true.
Here is what I know, if you get captured by Shia then you probably have a good chance of survival. If you get captured by Sunnis, you WILL have your head cut off. I have seen many more beheading videos that have not been released to the public. I honestly couldn't tell if the Sunnis were religous or not.

"Damn. I could build a nuclear bomb, given the fissionable material, but I can't tame my computer." (1VB)Jerome - French Rocket Scientist

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Replies to this message:
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Silent H
Member (Idle past 5820 days)
Posts: 7405
From: satellite of love
Joined: 12-11-2002


Message 56 of 58 (277549)
01-09-2006 12:36 PM
Reply to: Message 55 by Tal
01-06-2006 10:52 AM


At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Madison proposed the plan to divide the central government into three branches. He discovered this model of government from the Perfect Governor, as he read Isaiah 33:22
“For the LORD is our judge, the LORD is our lawgiver, the LORD is our king; He will save us.”
1) Where did you get this? Is there some reference to support it?
2) Madison was the only person to propose a separation of powers and in fact there had been no more recent examples in history of such separation (outside of nations)?
3) Do I have to point out that the passage suggests that all power should rest within one man? I don't think anyone was ignorant enough that they did not understand there was a difference between creating, judging, and enforcing laws. The point was who was to do these tasks. Isaiah suggests one man alone.

holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

This message is a reply to:
 Message 55 by Tal, posted 01-06-2006 10:52 AM Tal has replied

Replies to this message:
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Tal
Member (Idle past 5677 days)
Posts: 1140
From: Fort Bragg, NC
Joined: 12-29-2004


Message 57 of 58 (277720)
01-10-2006 10:23 AM
Reply to: Message 56 by Silent H
01-09-2006 12:36 PM


Madison claimed Isaiah 33:22 as the source of division of power in government
See also: pp.241-242 in Teaching and Learning America’s Christian History: The Principle approach by Rosalie Slater]
No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.grasstopsusa.net/Heritage/leaders.html
Another link.

"Damn. I could build a nuclear bomb, given the fissionable material, but I can't tame my computer." (1VB)Jerome - French Rocket Scientist

This message is a reply to:
 Message 56 by Silent H, posted 01-09-2006 12:36 PM Silent H has replied

Replies to this message:
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Silent H
Member (Idle past 5820 days)
Posts: 7405
From: satellite of love
Joined: 12-11-2002


Message 58 of 58 (277745)
01-10-2006 12:49 PM
Reply to: Message 57 by Tal
01-10-2006 10:23 AM


Another link.
1) You didn't answer my questions.
2) You only posted to a link which includes a bare assertion from someone else.

holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

This message is a reply to:
 Message 57 by Tal, posted 01-10-2006 10:23 AM Tal has not replied

  
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