McCain Supports Military Draft

[inudesu]

Yeah, my question was whether there is a separate word that would have been used for "kill" than "murder." "Murder" is a tricky term because it carries a legalistic concept - most significantly, "murder" requires a certain mens rea, usually the purposefuly killing of another, sometimes with malice aforethought. I am curious why some Christians believe that the instruction given to Moses did not apply to all killing and not just those that fit under the definition of murder.

Somewhere on another thread we have a good discussion of this, but I couldn't find it.

[saltydawg]

Why, how revisionist of you.
--It was Saddam's obligation to demonstrate that he was in compliance with UN resolutions to destroy WMDs, he never did, and after his capture was open about the fact that he was working to rebuild them, just waiting for international attention to drift elsewhere. He was acting as if he had WMDs, and never produced evidence to suggest otherwise.
--Iraq had a proven history of deploying WMDs against both its enemies and its own people.
--Iraq had begun military expansion posturing, for example deploying troops into Syria to harass neighbors such as Israel.
--Hussein was the only head of state to publicly praise the 9/11 attacks, and he went on to offer safe harbor (for the second time) OBL and any other al Qaeda operatives who wished. OBL declined the offer, but other al Qaeda operatives took him up on it and were living in Iraq at the time of the US invasion. And this is just al Qaeda. There were other terrorist groups he was providing with money and safe harbor, some of whom were operating training facilities within sovereign Iraq. Was 9/11 planned in or executed from Iraq? No. Did Iraq offer safe harbor members of the organization that planned and executed the 9/11 attacks? Yes. So I guess it depends on how you define "connection."
--The Bush administration did not invent the idea of invading Iraq to disarm Hussein, and if you will recall, Clinton secured a resolution from Congress in the '90s to do the same. But his administration decided that the domestic political cost of such an action was not worth the security gains from neutralizing a saber-rattling nutcase with a proven record of hostilities.
--Could the war have been prosecuted better? Certainly. That was not the kind of engagement to try out unproven military strategy. Something more along the lines of the Powell Doctrine would have been better, IMO. Not real wild about the naive assumption that the people would just rise up and spawn natural democracy after the invasion, and don't really like the mission creep that took the task from disarming Hussein to trying set up a democratic government.
--In 1941, the Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor. The US responded by attacking... Germany. Furthermore, that was a total war that resulted in a much higher percentage of both military and civilian casualties in affected areas than the current conflict. Was that, too, an unjust war? The US was never under direct threat of being overrun by any of the aggressors in that war.
--In a global economy, the "territorial integrity" of the US, much less "US interests" become much fuzzier concepts. A significant multinational crisis, especially one in the Middle East, has the potential to cripple the American economy in ways that any serious threat of attack to our sovereign territory could never come close to approaching. Even more than that, when we depend so fully on our economic allies for the stability of our own country, do we not believe that they are entitled to being free from acts of aggression from the likes of Saddam Hussein? If so, do we wait for another Kuwait or another Poland to get involved, or do we attempt to prevent those types of atrocities in the early stages? I think there is room for legitimate debate here. But that doesn't change the rest of the facts surrounding build-up to the current conflict in Iraq.

The Downing Street memo totally destroys your argument.