Kjartan Mannes

I dabble a little in politics now and then and try to keep up to date on global events. So, inevitably I end up having political discussions with people around the world. Today I had a bit of a weird encounter on IRC where we were discussing the current situation around the missing WMDs and what it would mean if the politicians from the USA and UK had lied. As such discussions go it was mostly friendly, they have a tendency to get heated unfortunately. However, at one point someone offered this gem of a thought:
<Fanatic> Hypothetically if you had been asleep for the past 50 years and when you woke up were told that we had just liberated millions of Iraqis from a cruel dictator, would you support it?
Not being one to ignore a challenge I had to rebut, it is this male ego of mine you know.
<Kjartan> Yes, well, where to start. You seem to miss the point of this debate, the moral issue is not in question. Of course we should liberate all people who live under oppressive regimes, but then why stop at Iraq? There must be several dozen other states out there that we could liberate. Also the freedom of the Iraqi people was not used as a main reason to go to war. The main reason was the immediate threat posed by Saddam and his regime. So far the evidence to support the positions by Bush and Blair before the war have not materialized.
<Kjartan> A better hypothetical would be: if you had been asleep for the past 60 years and when you woke up were told that we had just gone to war to destroy and prevent nuclear, biological and chemical weapons but after the war found no trace of them, even though we had such strong evidence we knew where they were before the war, would you support it?
<Kjartan> Both hypothetical situations are obviously flawed, but I think mine is closer to the events. Yours makes it into a moral issue which nobody in their right mind would say no to, but that was never how it was presented. Try again :)
* Fanatic has quit IRC (Leaving)
Guess he just didn't have any come back. It is really annoying to discuss politics with people who just repeat what they picked up from the nightly news instead of being able to think and make up their own opinions. We all get slanted by what we watch, but we should never fail to have our own opinions about the important issues.