D-Day + 70 years

Annachie wrote:It was Bush who sowed those seeds.

So you think that Saddam should have remained in power?

Bush 1 or Bush 2, or Reagan for supporting Iraq against Iran? May be we should blame Carter for sponsoring the overthrow of the Shah?

How about blaming Winston Churchill for drawing the borders without regard to ethnic and religious identities?

Of course we really should be blaming mostly European countries whose corruption of the Oil for Food Program encouraged Saddam to defy the UN and US.

I was specifically blaming Obama for two reasons.

1. He utterly failed (did notreallytry?) to negotiate a stutus of forces agreement that would have allowed the US to stabilize the country. (of course Obama could have been using US air power on the rebels but did not)

2. The ISIS rebels that are taking over Iraq are the same people that Obama has been supporting and arming in Syria and supported in Libya.

Daryl wrote:Sorry for any offence Fly. I was not intending to insult anyone's religion or show any disrespect to the brave men who participated.
I was just trying to point out that the speeches were somewhat jingoistic and high in propaganda.
A quick research indicates that in boots on the ground there were similar numbers of US troops to others, possibly somewhat more than half, while those supporting by sea were drawn from eight countries and predominately non US.
As to the religions I'm sure that many were Christian on both sides, and the concept of God taking sides is jingoistic. At present in Iraq the Sunnies and Shiites are each claiming that Allah is on their side.

Thank you for the clarification.

I know few Americans who do not understand that the US had allies during WW-2 including Austrailians.

It is also well understood that most of the naval support at D-Day was British as the USN was primarily focused on the Pacific.

The debate about whose side God was on goes back thousands of years. Most Germans were Catholic or Protestant but the Nazi leadership had invented it's own, pagan cult that was rather bizarre.

The extermination camps made it difficult to believe that God was on Hitler's side but for similar reasons it is equally improbable that God was on Stalin's side.

The only world leader on that beach celebrating the 70th Anniversary of D-Day that I am convinced is a Christian is Vladimir Putin. There were no Russian troops on the beach on D-Day but that beach would not have been taken if the German Army had not been already devastated on the Eastern front. Putin might be less aggressive in defending Russian interests if the US had a POTUS who he could respect. Perhaps someone who doesn't wrestle bears, she just shoots them?

The point is that D-day commemorations are solemn events that should not be sullied by idiotic sniping and quibbling about points that almost everyone is aware of.

namelessfly wrote:I say again that this conversation is evidence that the sacrifices that the US made in WW-2 have not been justified by time. If the US had simply not objected to the atrocities of Hitler and Tojo, including the rape of Nanking, and not imposed sanctions such as the oil and steel embargo, we could have save ourselves a lot of blood and treasure and perhaps avoided our own devolution
into secularist imbecility.

Most atheists simply object to having the government sanction, support and enforce a fantasy they don't believe in. Some of them are intolerant pricks that give the whole tribe a bad name, but they hardly have a monopoly on that, do they? It's one of Niven's Laws: there is no cause so noble that some shitheads won't follow it.

On the other hand, most religious types believe that they have the One, Final, Ultimate Truth, which means that people who disagree with them are not simply different, they are Wrong and Evil and Offensive To God and must be Brought To The Light At Any Cost. When somebody believes that their religion is more valuable than life itself, they become a danger to everybody. The lives of "infidels", "heretics", "unbelievers" and other outsiders have no value at all, and even the lives of True Believers are trivial compared to the Crusade, or Jihad, or whatever insanity has got hold of them.

The main reason we don't have that here in the USA is that the government (mostly) doesn't take sides, no one group is powerful enough to subjugate all the rest, and they can't really combine forces against the other groups because that ends with There Can Be Only One and yours might not end up on top. In theory it's freedom of religion, in practice it's more of a Mexican Standoff.
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It takes two to make peace. It only takes one to make war.

I thought maybe I had been wondering too much, but I hadn't even imagined that religion of all things could be brought into the discussion.

This, on the other hand, is more or less what I was anticipating :

namelessfly wrote:The point is that D-day commemorations are solemn events that should not be sullied by idiotic sniping and quibbling about points that almost everyone is aware of.

Because I am contrary, I am going to write a Bad Thing :

You want me to commemorate their landing, when it was supposed to be the prelude to a second military occupation of the country ? No, never, count me out !

It's not a given that such commemorations are appropriate from everyone's point of view.

(My apologies to Duckk if this thread ends up getting out of hand)

Regarding religion...

Imagine a diamond. Not a drawing of one, but an actual diamond.
It is the size of the universe.
Now, each facet of the diamond is a different religion and each face is unique.
Most people see only the facet of the diamond that they are closest to and assume that the facet that they see is the whole thing and thus anyone who claims differently is wrong.

Only a few (proportionately speaking) can understand that there are other facets that also exist.
Even fewer can understand the facets themselves.

And yet, with all of this concentration on the facets, the diamond itself is ignored. People argue over which facet is the true one without realising that all are true and all are part of something infinitely greater.

This is why I dislike religious arguments. They are arguing about the wrong thing. Those that argue for a specific religion seek to limit the potential for true understanding.

And too many people mistake the echoes of their bigotry for the Word of God.

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Regarding the D-Day landings, they were needed to remove Nazism from its position of control. The Nazi Regime, however, was not the one that killed the most civilians. That honour (depending on how you count them) goes to either Russia (with its purges and Siberian Death Camps) or to China (with its so-called Great Leap Forwards) while the highest in percentage terms was Cambodia under the maniac Pol Pot.
The Nazi Regime was extremely expansionist and an obvious threat to the stability of the other countries. The only way to stop it was to counter-attack. Chamberlain proved that negotiations did not work when only one side kept their word. The Germany of the time resorted to military action as its first response to problems, promulgating the underlying belief that "Might Makes Right", a belief that is usually quickly abandoned when one encounters a superior adversary.

D-Day was the beginning of the end for the Nazi Regime and should be commemorated as such. It sent a message that such expansionist tactics would not be tolerated by the civilised world, a message that has held true to this day, despite Argentina's actions.

Although the price was high, D-Day needed to be done.

Anything less would have led to far greater bloodshed.

Annachie wrote:It was Bush who sowed those seeds.

namelessfly wrote:So you think that Saddam should have remained in power?

Bush 1 or Bush 2, or Reagan for supporting Iraq against Iran? May be we should blame Carter for sponsoring the overthrow of the Shah?

How about blaming Winston Churchill for drawing the borders without regard to ethnic and religious identities?

Of course we really should be blaming mostly European countries whose corruption of the Oil for Food Program encouraged Saddam to defy the UN and US.

I was specifically blaming Obama for two reasons.

I merely pointed out your historical inaccuracy.
Your comments are irrelevant and unrelated.

In spite of Bush's mistakes (Paul Bremmer) Iraq was stabilizing when Obama came to office. EVERYONE understood that Iraq would not remain stable unless the US maintained a presence just as we did in Europe and Japan after WW-2. Europe and Japan would have became a charnel house if the US had not occupied them. Obama chose to abandon Iraq for partisan political reasons which encouraged the Shia Muslims to indulge in the partisan excesses that alienated the Sunnis. This might have been forgivable if the imbecile and chief had not then incited and sponsored the Arab Spring which enabled radical islamicists to overthrow relatively moderate regimes in Egypt and Libya. The ISIS terrorists now marching on Bahgdad are the same revolutionaries that Obama provided weapons and other support to overthrow Assad in Syria.

The proper analogy is raising a puppy to be a vicious dog then sending the dog over to attack your neighbor that you don't like only to have the dog attack another neighbor that was allegedly your friend. Not a nice thing to do and really, really stupid. It is analogous to the US not just abandoning South Vietnam but funding and providing weapons to the NVA that took Saigon.

Annachie wrote:

Annachie wrote:It was Bush who sowed those seeds.

namelessfly wrote:So you think that Saddam should have remained in power?

Bush 1 or Bush 2, or Reagan for supporting Iraq against Iran? May be we should blame Carter for sponsoring the overthrow of the Shah?

How about blaming Winston Churchill for drawing the borders without regard to ethnic and religious identities?

Of course we really should be blaming mostly European countries whose corruption of the Oil for Food Program encouraged Saddam to defy the UN and US.

I was specifically blaming Obama for two reasons.

I merely pointed out your historical inaccuracy.
Your comments are irrelevant and unrelated.

Oh I fully agree that after messing the places up we are morally obliged to help put the places back together, and that that is something that doesn't seem to have happened yet. Though Iraq was looking close to it, on the surface at least.


On the other hand, recent history shows that Afghanistan is an entirely different proposition. Fixing that place is seriously long term with the payoff way down the track, and administrations are loath to go into anything where they might not be in power to reap the reward.


I personally wonder if the forces that stayed in Germany and Japan has more to do with Russia and China than any sense of occupation or moral duty. Something to research one day I suppose.

Oh, your analogies are off. It is sponsoring someone to "stabilize" a region, then finding out that your someone is more bat shit psychotic that who they replace.