Saddam ordered his forces to target and fire upon peacekeepers which were allowed to patrol Iraq as part of the Gulf War cease-fre agreements. Each instance is a violation of the cease fire.

“and the means to attack does not equate to the desire or willingness to attack”

Saddam expressed his desire and announced plans for aggression very frequently. So your pro-Saddam argument fails again.

“In other words, the examples you cite are ridiculous”

No, they are not. If Japan had engaged in such aggression after the end of WW2 as Saddam did after the end of the Gulf War, WW2 would have still been on.

“If you cannot tell the difference between someone really, really wishing they could actually attack us as our jets fly over their territory and bomb with impunity ”

Saddam did not merely “wish”. He attacked. Also, the “with inpunity” was bombing terrorists facilities that Saddam was to have dismantled immediately after the end of the first Gulf War.

“….an actual attack on US territory that kills thousands of military personnel and virtually destroys an entire fleet”

You must be the kind of person who thinks it is OK for an aggressive enemy to keep attacking us, and only really bother to do something once he makes good on explicit plans, attempts, and threats to do really major damage.

Using this twisted sort of logic, I guess it was right of Bush and Clinton to pretty much ignore Bin Laden prior to 9-11, since his crimes up to that point were definite but not really big.

“then you’re exactly the kind of person who our leaders count on to sucker us into war.”

The war was already on by the time the US was forced to launch a major retaliation in 2003 after years of trying to get Saddam to comply with very reasonable cease-fire requirements. The retaliation against Saddam Hussein and the largest terrorist army in the world was entirely justified, and would not be that controversial had Rumsfeld not botched the reconstruction so badly.

In other words, the examples you cite are ridiculous. If you cannot tell the difference between someone really, really wishing they could actually attack us as our jets fly over their territory and bomb with impunity and an actual attack on US territory that kills thousands of military personnel and virtually destroys an entire fleet…then you’re exactly the kind of person who our leaders count on to sucker us into war.

The US retaliated against Iraq also. The Saddam Hussein regime had violated the cease-fire with hundreds of attacks against the inspectors allowed by the cease-fire. Saddam Hussein possessed the means and desire to attack the US and other neighboring nations. He had already engaged in aggression against Kuwait, the US, the UK, and Israel… all after the first Gulf War cease-fire.

The Iraq war was no more “preventive” than attacking Japan after Pearl Harbor.

And I don’t know that I agree with your vision of trade–traders go _everywhere_; note, for example, the inineraries of Zheng He, a (primarily) peaceful trader/explorer, or the early travels of fur traders throughout much of North America. A hypothetical set of less-contemptible Europeans who only came to trade and explore would still have ranged all over the hemisphere, and history suggests they would have found willing trading partners almost anywhere they went. I still conend–and I am arguing very narrowly here, I hope you appreciate that–that massive pandemics were unavoidable. The exploitation of these pandemics for conquest and plunder are unforgivable, but the 1524 plague can not be laid on Pizarro’s head.

Respectfully yours,

Craig

Read it, reviewed it.

http://thelocalcrank.blogspot.com/2006/10/book-review-1491-by-charles-c-mann.html

It most certainly does not support your contention. Mann, like most scholars, shows that smallpox and other diseases to which Indians had low resistence due to various genetic factors, moved ahead of, but not very much far ahead of, the invading Europeans. For example, Tawantinsuyu (the Incan Empire) was weakened by an outbreak of disease in 1532, concurrent with Pizarro’s invasion. Diseases simply do not work like they are portrayed in movies and on television, where a killer disease whips around the world pretty much all by itself, wiping everyone out in the course of a day or two. Diseases need carriers. There was trade in pre-Columbian America, but that by itself is insufficient to account for epidemics eventually reaching every square inch of the Western Hemisphere. Your example of De Soto actually proves my point; he blundered all across the Southwest, trailing disease behind him. If the Europeans had come to trade, there would have been no need to wander around looking for some mythical golden city. As in Africa, Japan and China, the Europeans would have leased (or more likely conquered) some coastal city and run a trade empire from there. of course, in the immortal words of my old history professor, history is not written in the subjunctive. The Europeans did not come to trade, they came to loot and conquer and in so doing, killed one quarter of the entire human race.

We’re going to have to disagree on this, but, I am confident I am expressing something much closer to expert consensus when I say that many millions would have died under any circumstances. See, for example, Mann’s recent book “1491″ for a very good summary of the current state of research. We have any number of incidents where whole populations were wiped out by fairly minor interaction with Europeans, such as the southeastern United States societies described by de Soto (a completely revolting murderer and plunderer, in case my opinions are unclear). Deloria’s notion that “medicine men” would have worked out how to eliminate smallpox under different circumstances is, by contrast, pretty speculative.

We were here first.

No. Afghanistan was not pre-emptive. It was retaliatory, and thus entirely legitimate (and I don’t care what some lunatics on the far left think; we were perfectly entitled to destroy a government that shielded terrorists who killed thousands of our civilians.) Neither was Iraq pre-emptive, in that we did not invade to pre-empt an attack on our own country (as it has been definitively established that Hussein possessed neither the means nor the desire to attack us.) Iraq was a preventive war, meaning we invaded to “prevent” some speculative future attack. In the canons international law, a preventive war is no different from an illegal war of aggression, as frequently the language of preventive war is used to justify wars for other purposes…which is exactly what happened with Iraq.

You may be mixing up your history, perhaps thinking of how nearly a decade of bombing and carpet bombing by the U.S. of rural Cambodia drove the peasantry into the hands of the lunatic Khmer Rouge guerrillas, who went on to slaughter even more people than those who had been killed by the U.S. bombings and the mass starvation the bombing largely caused. A slaughter which was ended, and unfortunately only could have been ended only by the invasion of the unified Vietnam next door.

And not even the U.S. military considered the war to be caused by “Soviet aggression”. This is simply another deluded John Birch / David Horowitz attempt to rewrite the entire 20th century as a simple black / white struggle by brave right wing defenders of freedom against Soviet / Maoist aggression.

Vietnam is a good example.The war was nothing more than successful Soviet aggression in Southeast Asia, and the US doing a poor job of preventing it. After the Soviet proxy state conquered South Vietnam, they treated it as occupied territory to rape and plunder, not as liberated land. They killed 2 or 3 million South Vietnamese in reprisal, and the “boat people” left after this “liberation”, not before. The real tragedy was that the US failed to prevent this.

Iraq and Afghanistan, both (at the time) aggressor states that attacked te US. Both were told to call it off, and refused. The retaliations were a last resort, and it was not “preemptive war” when war was already on.

Actually no. Smallpox was spread primarily as the invaders moved throughout the continent (though admittedly, some was spread from Indians who became infected and then followed existing trade routes, which is the reason why New England tribes had been practically decimated before large scale white colonization by the Pilgrims). If Europeans had come “only to trade,” there would have been no need for them to trudge all over creation, bringing their pestilence with them. Moreover, a trade mission would not have required thousands upon thousands upon thousands of Europeans arriving. A slower rate of invasion, and without the additional population pressure of warfare, forced migrations and so forth (many Mexican tribes were, quite literally, worked to death by the tens and hundreds of thousands by the conquistadores) would have enabled the Native population to develop immunities to the new diseases, as they eventually did (obviously, since we’re still here). Vine Delorio, Jr. also postulates that if the rate of infection and speed of invasion had not been so high, Indian medicine men would have been able to develop effective countermeasures.

If you’re still reading, I wanted to respond to a couple of points you raised. You talked about the lack of representation at NMAI of what could be called the modern scientific treatment of American Indian orgins–the Bering land bridge, one wave vs. two wave vs. three wave, what have you. I was a bit baffled by that at first, too. That’s how I would have started the whole museum experience off. But the de-emphasis of (European) science and the emphasis of (American Indian) traditions and beliefs is, really, the whole point of the exhibit. I’ve seen on a few occassions Indians take real umbrage at white archaeologists telling them where they came from and when they got there. “A few years ago, we were the lost tribes of Israel, and now you say we’re Siberians. Well, nuts to what you say!” Now, what can I say? Of course, I like the land bridge story a lot better than I like anyone’s story about being shaped out of clay or what have you, but NMAI was not intended to be a place where I get to tell the Indians about themselves, but rather where _they_ get to tell _me_–and people like me. So I’m trying to be open-minded about that. For the scientific story, we have Natural History across the street.

Your point about the Holocaust Museum is particularly well-taken. Nazi Germany has become a sociologically fascinating phenomenon in modern America–a kind of totem of evil that we can hold up to be hissed at and spat upon and used to convince ourselves of how good and righteous we are by comparison. NMAI provides part of the needed corrective to this, by openly presenting the American Indian dispossession on the National Mall. The forthcoming African American museum will, I hope, do even more. I have always had a vision in my mind for the entrance hall to that museum–a 360 degree panorama of the National Mall in the early 19th century, with a slave auction in progress. I sincerely hope they manage to hit that hard.