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Oh, the 51% majority is the "rest" fo the country
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You are right...some people who didnt vote for Bush probably still felt the same way. So the total is more than 51%.
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Me: If only liberals understood that Iraq accounts for a vert small percentage of our oil...I am not even sure if it balances what we have already paid into this war. This was not a cheap war.
Maybe if you understood that we are not talking about now. Iraq has been under an embargo. Iraq has the 2nd largest known oil reserves in the world right. That is a fact.
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And we get a tiny amount of our oil from Iraq. That is a fact. If Iraq vanished in a giant crater tomorrow, the US would still exist just fine. It would drive prices up a little...thats it.
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When (not if) oil becomes a scarce resource in the future, wouldn't having a nice friendly democratic country who owes their freedom to us sitting on these large reserves be in our strategic interests.... That is the neocon arguement.
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Which Neocons are arguing that? None that I have ever heard.
Most Neocons I know favor development of alternative fuels for the same reason I do: so we are no dependant on our enemies for energy.
The benefit of having a democracy in place of a dictatorship is
defence, not energy or economics. As a rule, democracies do not attack one another.
If the US played these games, we would not be installing democracies, now would we? A pliant dictator would serve those ends much better.
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Name our best and most reliable allies. Say Britain, Germany, Japan for instance. How many are dictators.
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We cant make those people do what we want...they are answerable to various congresses/parlarments/whatever. Not to mention the masses, as they must be re-elected.
Dictators are not bound by any of that. Thats why the US supported dictators in the past. We could make them do what we wanted in the long term.
Even Britain's Blair is taking heat from his own population for being percieved as a US lapdog.
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And the President is nto supposed to intentionally lie to the American people in the state of the Union and elsewhere.
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What did he lie about?
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The Administration should not ignore the experts in the CIA and State Department and rely on intelligence bought by a special newly formed intelligence department in the DOD that was created to justify the pre-determine beliefs.
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Those experts are not elected.
Dan Rather was worse because he was pretending to be unbiased. Bush is not unbiased.
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Over 1000 Americans did not die because of Dan's mistake.
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If those 1000 deaths prevented 100,000, then they were not a mistake.
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Of course not. That is why this neocon administration is lying about their motives. How much is spent on oil by the US in a year???? A few hundred billion to secure oil to ensure our future economy is worth it in the neocon mind.
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Please cite your Neocon source for this.
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Plus, I think they really believed it would not cost much, like they claimed.
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Who claimed that?
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Remember, oil was going to pay for the war.
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Oil still might...I dont disagree that the Iraqi People need to shoulder some of teh financial burden. After all, they will reap plenty of benefits from it in the future.
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I wonder if one of Bush's daughters was killed in the war if he would be so quick to think it was worth it?
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If we took a poll and a majority of the parents of those killed said it was still worth it, would that legitimize it in your eyes?
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The economic security of industrialized nations depends on a supply of cheap oil. The idea of simply transforming to a different energy source on a whim is a fairy tale. Transitioning between oil and the next energy source will be turbulent.
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But not impossible. Over the long term it is not that big a deal.
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There hasn't been a major oil field discovery in a very long time, I think 20 years or more. Iraq has large proven reserves, making it a very strategic location.
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How much of our oil do we get from Iraq?
At our highest peak, it was under 6.7%. Found this via a casual google search (current as of 2003):
Please note that from 91 to 96, Iraq provided NO OIL IMPORTS to the US at all...yet somehow we managed to survive just fine. Is it magic?