Politics: Where we struggle to kneel in the muck.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Diane_Keaton
The narrow topic was the number of child casualties caused by the sanctions versus the number of child casualties caused by our forces in Iraq. It was not the number of child casualties caused by utilizing Tactic A during the Iraq invasion/occupation versus utilizing Tactic B during the Iraq invasion/occupation.

That may have been your topic, but that's not what I was talking about. The original topic was the success of containment in dealing with the threat posed by Hussein to us (i.e., WMD), not the threat he posed to his own people, but you have dropped that one like a hot rock.

You have it backward. The ultimate end would be humanitarian. (At least for starving children that is) even if the impetus for our actions was non-humanitarian.

I'm not opposed to acting out of humanitarian concerns, but I think the ultimate end of our foreign policy should be national security. I usually have this discussion with bleeding-heart lefties, so it's something of a shock to hear this sort of earnestness from the right.

And I'll look for evidence you knew or cared from such time as the sanctions started, as opposed to when the politics started.

Does anyone disagree that Hussein was a bad man? No. The world is full of them. Robert Mugabe, for example, has been starving his own people for years. Unfortunately, there are real limits to our ability to effect social change in other parts of the world. The question is rarely, how bad are things, but, what can we do about them?