Yes but doesn’t it make a mockery of the US justification “we’re doing it for people’s freedom”, when they could so much more easily have taken out Mugabe of Busted-arse Zimbabwe or whoever of busted-arse Darfur to give some people a chance of some freedom; but they DON’T, instead they take on a harder target like Saddam’s Iraq which – lo and behold – has plentiful oil to supply the west?

But no, it’s not about oil, it’s about FREEDOM; it really, really is!

Of course this was exactly the same argument made by left-wingers in the wake of the First Gulf War. That the US did not really give a shit about freedom in pushing Iraq out of Kuwait. If they had really cared about freedom they would have gone all the way down the highway to Baghdad and taken out Saddam. But they did not because all they really cared about was keeping the oil flowing, allowing a dicatator some measure of control – not too much, but not so little that the true Voice Of The People could triumph and …….. well, you know the rest. The following comment on US and British decision makers by Dr Eric Herring (University of Bristol) is a good example:

They have no desire for the Shiite majority to take control or for the Kurds to achieve independence. Their policy is to keep them strong enough to cause trouble for Saddam Hussein while ensuring that Saddam Hussein is strong enough to keep repressing them.

This is not a new policy. It is a direct descendant of British imperial policy from World War One onwards. Britain controlled Iraqi oil wealth through Sunni minority monarchs who put down rebellions by the Kurdish minority and the Shiite majority. When those Sunni minority monarchs became too nationalist and too powerful, Britain fuelled Kurdish and Shiite opposition just far enough to rein in the monarch but not far enough for the opposition to actually win.

Divide and rule was, and is, the policy.

What’s the bet that Dr Herring was a vocal opponent of the 2003 invasion of Iraq? And I’d be willing to bet further that a US armed force going into Darfur or Mugabeland would get exactly the same reaction from the RRM’s of this world after all the “if they really believe…. they’d …….” pieties.

Perhaps I should have filed this under the Anti-American thread?

Still, if McCain does pull off a miracle and win the Presidency there could be at least one more “busted-arse”, anti-freedom outfit the US takes out – they’re close too – a single building in East Manhattan.

“………President Bush was quite correct in listing his least favorite regimes during his address to the United Nations last week and in trying to ramp up the international pressure on the goons in Rangoon. The governments that he singled out were the uniquely repellent ones that consider the citizen to be the property of the state and the uniquely boring ones that have remained in power until their citizens are positively screaming for release. I do not need to specify these senescent gangster systems individually, except that they all have one thing in common. They are all defended, from Cuba to Zimbabwe, by the Chinese vote at the United Nations.

Those who care or purport to care about human rights must start to discuss this problem in plain words. Is there an initiative to save the un-massacred remains of the people of Darfur? It will be met by a Chinese veto. Does anyone care about Robert Mugabe treating his desperate population as if it belonged to him personally? China is always ready to help him out. Are the North Koreans starved and isolated so that a demented playboy can posture with nuclear weapons? Beijing will give the demented playboy a guarantee. How long can Southeast Asia bear the shame and misery of the Burmese junta? As long as the embrace of China persists. The identity of Tibet is being obliterated by the deliberate importation of Chinese settlers. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a man who claims even to know and determine the sex lives of his serfs (by the way, the very essence of totalitarianism), is armed and financed by China. It was this way when President Bill Clinton wanted the United Nations to take on Slobodan Milosevic and was stymied (by China, among others), and it was this way when President Bush asked the United Nations to live up to its resolutions on Saddam Hussein. And now I hear human rights activists bleating about Burma and our inaction and simultaneously complaining about the only time that any U.S. president had the nerve to break the hold of China (and Russia, and sometimes France) on the possibility of any international rescue…..”

But no, it’s not about oil, it’s about FREEDOM; it really, really is!

And I have pointed out before, it is OIL MONEY that makes dictators like Saddam dangerous. Mugabe is dictator of a busted-arse country. THAT is the difference. If the USA was really the evil imperialist that radical leftists like to make out, they could have easily invaded and occupied the entire middle east decades ago and had ALL the oil for themselves, and no-one could have stopped them, either.

This is not “letters to the editor” in the MSM. Intelligent argument is allowed here.

Yeah I guess pissing off teachers is always going to backfire on you, considering with the pay/conditions/hours they have to put up with, not to mention the crucial nature of their job.

I would think it’d be REALLY hard for someone to go from Obama to McCain seeing as how often McCain is characterised as ‘Bush III’ which is much more plausible than the crap people have come up with for Obama.

The top-up is typically only permitted by private schools, not by public ones. But of course we have top ups by stealth now, so they’d probably continue.

He (Obama) constantly hammers home the “change” message without actually saying what he will do, his speeches are nothing more than one would expect from an idealistic 17 year old.

Wait a mo’, so where’s McCain’s substance again. Now let’s replay the answers to the tax question DPF was so impressed by.

On taxes, Obama waxed political: “What I’m trying to do is create a sense of balance and fairness in our tax code.” McCain showed an understanding of what drives a free economy: “I don’t want to take any money from the rich. I want everybody to get rich. I don’t believe in class warfare or redistribution of the wealth.”

So, how exactly does the executive branch of the US Government make people rich — Will he make the Bush tax-cuts permanent? Continue the expansion of government and government spending? Does his opposition to “redistribution of the wealth” extend to a McCain Administration actually (gasp!) vetoing pork-laden bills until Capitol Hill gets the hint and goes on a fiscally kosher diet?

As for vouchers, the argument really comes down to things like zoning, additional costs on top, and selection of children.

The position on the right is basically that the current policies disadvantage the poor, and don’t really stop the rich. The rich get their kids into good schools by simply buying a house in the right school zone. They get to send their kids to good schools on the public purse. This also becomes self-fulfilling, as more and more rich people turn up in the neighbourhood they have more time to invest in the schools, more money, their kids tend to be better behaved (chicken or egg I don’t know, but I think statistically proveable), these schools draw in good teachers, good teachers provide more educational choice, so on in a virtuous cycle. If they really want to they send their kids to private schools – to do this you have to pay once in your taxes and again on the school fees, but they’re rich so they do this.

Poor people get stuck in their local schools. These schools are in poor areas of town, so they tend to have lower achievement. Teaching is harder, teachers try to get out. Unfortunately for these poor people, zoning forces them to go to their local school – they cannot get their kids into the good schools in another zone. They have no money to go private, and certainly couldn’t afford to pay the full cost.

Vouchers allow poor people to send their kids to any school that will take their voucher. If so desired, the voucher can be used in a private school – probably with a top-up, but that top-up is way less than paying the full school fees. The schools that are in demand can expand, the schools nobody wants their kids at will basically shut. Schools that offer non-standard service will spring up – schools that run from 8-5pm so you can have a job, schools that specialise in sports or arts outside the standard curriculum, schools with non-standard teaching methods such as Montessori schools etc. Diversity is good, because not every kid needs the same teaching style, and generally parents know what sort of teaching style might suit their children.

In short, the argument is that vouchers are good for everyone, but especially good for the poor. They appear to have worked in Sweden, but for a variety of reasons the experience in Sweden isn’t necessarily able to be extrapolated everywhere. They haven’t really been tried anywhere else, usually because of teacher’s union resistence, despite many on the right having campaigned vigorously for them for decades. Unfortunately the VRWC must have had a few bad decades there – I’m sure we used to rule the world and do whatever we wanted.

Those on the left, conversely argue that vouchers are wasteful. All public schools give a good education, and the education department carefully plans what schools go where. If some schools close and others open, we end up with unused assets. And the parents with half a brain will move their kids, stripping the brightest kids out of the lower decile schools. All the idiots who vote Labour are too stupid to move their kids to another schools, so they will be still worse off because their kids are now in a failing school that all the halfway decent kids will leave. And schools would become culturally and socially stratified, as parents choose to send their kids to schools that have people “like them”. Further, the kids in the schools that are in the process of failing are much worse off, because their school will eventually fall apart – and what happens to them then? What’s more, the market is known to be imperfect, so whilst we can trust it to do things like feed and clothe us, it is inconceivable that we could leave something important like education to the random actions of the people to decide.

(I sort of tried to be unbiased, but not really. But you can probably see the outlines of the argument from the left)

A lot depends on your definition of ‘evil’ I suppose, but here are some examples of other nasties going on in the world, all but one (or possibly two, we’ll never know) of which involve people killing other people who haven’t done anything (much) wrong:

*Egyptian Border guards on the Israel-Egypt border routinely shoot Refugees from Darfur & the Ivory Coast as they attempt to cross into Israel.
*4 Foreigners have been murdered in Kiev this year because locals did not like the colour of their skin.
* In July the UK Ministry of Defence agreed to compensate the family of Iraqi hotelier Baha Mousa, who English armed forces tortured to death in Basra over a period of 36 Hours in 2003.
*About 60 people were killed by terrotist bombs in Jaipur in India during May.
*Widespread killings of Somali civilians by Ethiopian troops – (cutting the victim’s throat is the preferred technique here as bullets can only be used once.) In April they did 21 at a time, in a Mosque.
*Saudi Arabia still conducts public executions in the tudor English style, with a sword to carry out the beheading but without what you or I would call a Trial or a Defence Counsel.
*In Colombia, people don’t just dislike trade unionists, they murder them! 22 so far this year…
*Patrick Okoroafor still in jail in Nigeria (sans several teeth). Read this one, it’s not very nice! http://www.amnesty.org/en/appeals-for-action/free-patrick-okoroafor
*Russian cluster bombs (and their unexploded bomblets) have killed at least 14 civilians in Georgia so far.
*Leftie guerilla fighters in Colombia blew up 7 people including children at a party last thursday.
In Bangladesh the elite cops are called the “Rapid Action Battallion”. They don’t rapidly arrest people and hold them for trial, they just kill them! 50 victims since June.
*Various armed bands in Congo have killed at least 200 people this year (chopping them up into pieces with machetes is how they roll in the Congo) and raping the local womenfolk is as widespread as taking a dump in the morning by some accounts.

All of these should be Googleable.
As I was saying, heroic US intervention follows the oil, not the evil.