1. This is a good thing
  2. I'm not sure that's true. I can't speak to UK politics, but I'm not sure about Bush. Certainly there is a massive amount of protest about his actions, but they're not likely to vote for him under any circumstances. Of the rest (of which I am not a part), I don't have a good handle on whether they want war or they want a resolution to this situation (which I still believe was largely the fault of the Bush administration, if not outright engineered by it).
  3. I'm not sure that the loss of power follows, nor, if it did, that that would be a bad thing. Canada is not a major world power, and you don't see terrorists going after it, even though it has a largely similar world view. But I think that the international community knows that the US is an elected republic, and that these actions are largely based on the current administration, not as part of public support. If Bush were reelected next time (let's hope not), then that might come into play as a show of public support for his own private war.
  4. I don't know that diplomacy alone, or the resolution to not fight, can make one a world power. Maybe it ought to.
  5. I think that you're flat-out incorrect about the UN. It was well publicized a year or two ago that the US has been consistently failing to pay its UN dues. So I don't think that not receiving money it's already not receiving will have a great impact.
  6. At this point, the majority of the Arabic and Islamic Asian community already hates us, for both legitimate and illegitimate reasons. I don't think that anything we do at this point is going to have an effect. As I already implied, tying Iraq to terrorism with little to no evidence was just stupid, and just makes it seem like we're focusing our attentions on the international Islamic community, while nearly ignoring the probably greater threat in North Korea.
  7. That point is irrelevant. You're arguing that these are the consequences of not attacking, and your point is that it won't make a difference. Maybe you're saying that that is an invalid reason not to attack, in which case, you're right, but I don't think it's really significant.
  8. I'd hate to see a world where every Tom, Dick, and Harry has nuclear weapons, but I still think that it's somewhat disingenuous for the US to say, essentially, ``Now that we have nuclear weapons, along with our friends, we think it's time that no one else gets to have them.'' That's like taking your ball and going home. You and I would both like to say that the countries that have them now (barring India and Pakistan and North Korea, if they have them) are unlikely to attack another country, but the US is getting ready to attack Iraq without either provocation or international support. In addition, I don't think that popular support is necessarily the proper way to determine these things. Many awful things have been done under the auspices of popular support.
  9. This is the TD&H argument from before. I simply don't have an answer for this. I assume that you're saying that human rights issues are certainly an appropriate reason for intervention (possibly amongst other reasons), and I agree. But I don't know how you can prevent this. How many formerly Soviet nuclear weapons are wandering around the world right now? We don't know. And there's no need to test. You only have to get it right once. So there's no way to find out who's doing anything, really, unless they want you to know about it.
  10. I don't know that this is necessarily the case, but it's certainly a greater possibility than it was before, but, I don't think that, at this point, not attacking will have any effect on this.
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Bitt Faulk