but the best thing for the USA would be to have a viable third party that is neither republican nor democrat
Before you can have a viable third party, you need an electoral system that does not punish the interests of the voters who vote for that party. For example, left-leaning voters who voted for Nader in 2000 handed the election to Bush by splitting the vote for the left. Likewise, when Buchanan ran he drew right-wing-leaning voters away from the GOP. Because of the way the voting system works in the US, any third party candidate who runs will automatically reduce the chances of his supporter's preferred political beliefs being put into practice.
Actually, I did consider it, but rejected that idea. Saddam and his sons had to go.
The thing about foreign policy is that it's really not that simplistic.
Sometimes when the hero in white comes a-ridin' into the village to save the damsel in distress, he winds up getting half of the village slaughtered by the bad guys (or in the crossfire), and the damsel, knowing that the hero won't be here forever, prefers to hand herself back over to the bad guys to save the rest of the villagers. It's the lesser of two evils for her.
Now I agree with you that Saddam and sons were evil. The real question is, though, were the consequences of their evil actions worse than the deaths and brutalizations that have occurred as a direct result of the US's intervention?
Over 655,000 civilian lives lost....including little girls and boys. That's not counting the wounded and maimed. That's not counting the millions who are refugees in neighboring countries. That's not counting the US's casualties and maimed soldiers, or the effects on their families. That's not even counting the US's loss of reputation and moral standing due to illegal torture and breaches of the geneva convention.
This isn't hindsight either. Most of this was all predicted long before the chicken-hawks came to power. Heck, even W's dad knew enough to quit at the right time during gulf war 1. The sole exception being that the US would lower its standards and commit evil itself (torture is evil and illegal).
Bush lied about his reasons for going to war. He lied about this being a response to 9/11 (the two are completely unrelated). He's lying now when he claims there's hope for a peaceful outcome. No matter what the US does now, there WILL be a full-on civil war when the US eventually leaves. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands more will die. Women will be raped and killed. Children brutalized and maimed. A generation will be traumatized. Eventually, what remains there will be Islamic law like in Iran.
And every single one of those people who suffer through, and survive that war, will lay the blame for it squarely at the foot of the USA. Imagine how the recruiters of Bin Laden feel about now?
And then there's the obvious extension of your argument....if Saddam had to go, does that mean Khomeini has to go next? Kim Jung what's his face? What about the Somali drug/war lords? What about Mugabe in Zimbabwe? What about the evildoers in Darfur? What about the chinese dissidents slaughtered in Tiannaman square and imprisoned/executed every year? How about the genital mutliation of african women? At the rate you're going, the US will have about three soldiers per country that you're going to need to invade to 'remove' all the evildoers. And given that China is backing North Korea and financing those in Darfur, you have Pakistan boiling over with Islamic fundamentalists, and Russia not very happy with the US's ballistic missile shield and with oil interests of their own in the region....WWIII?
For evil to triumph, good men must do nothing. That's true. But in this case, it is the good men and women of Iraq who needed to rise up against the evil of saddam and sons. The moment that the US became involved, both sides in Iraq had a convenient scapegoat for all their ills. A generation or more will grow up with that hatred in their hearts.
Know how to irreversibly spoil the poor? Give them every government program they want.
As someone who grew up in a welfare system, who gained higher education and became a productive worker who contributes taxes and other tangible benefits to society, I find that statement really insulting.
If I had grown up in the USA my mother would not have been able to support me or my sisters. I would have spent my life in foster homes, or juv. detention centers, and been even more troubled as a youth than I was by the breakdown of my family at a young age. There was a time where I could have gone into crime to overcome my financial problems. I did not. I am grateful for the chances I was given. For the food (bad as it was) I was able to eat as a kid. For the education and health care I received even though my mother was extremely poor.
For the welfare money and accessible education for the poor, my home country got a biologist, a nurse, and a earlier childhood educator from my mother. Without it, they would have received a homeless lady and three snot-nosed kids who had to turn to crime to make their way in the world. (Of course I moved stateside when I married a great lady from here, but would move back to NZ in a heartbeat with her if we could bring her family along too).
The reason that welfare systems were invented, why programs for the poor have attraction to the rest of society, is that they reduce the cost to society for NOT having those programs. The USA has what, the highest prison occupancy rates in the western world? You also have the worst welfare in the western world. Police, Courts, and Prisons cost a lot more to run than welfare costs to run!
Yes, it is true that fraud and abuse of these programs can occur. So what? Fraud and abuse happen on Wall Street too. The Wall Street ones just hurt more people than the other kind. The thing is that good outcomes are made possible through such programs. Without them, they become much more rare and the cost to society becomes that much worse.
Don't forget, that when the gap between the very wealthy and the rest of society gets too large, history shows us that the citizenry will rise up and redistribute the wealth by force.
The USA is not a democracy ...
That bit I can agree with
