Paty Robertson Says Bush Predicted No Iraq Toll (religion)

[NewsBot/WarnBot]

The evangelical broadcaster Pat Robertson has set off a partisan fight by telling a television interviewer that President Bush serenely assured him just before the invasion of Iraq, "Oh, no, we're not going to have ...

http://www.religionnewsblog.com/news.php?p=9060&c=1

[Bright-ness' Shadow]

Originally Posted by NewsBot

The evangelical broadcaster Pat Robertson has set off a partisan fight by telling a television interviewer that President Bush serenely assured him just before the invasion of Iraq, "Oh, no, we're not going to have ...

http://www.religionnewsblog.com/news.php?p=9060&c=1

This deserves a look.

[Sunstone]

Ditto, Pah. Deserves a look. The more I come to know about the thought (or lack of thought) that went into the Iraq war at it's planning stages, the more I wonder whether this administration has a solid grasp of reality.

[Mr Spinkles]

And you think Pat Robertson has a solid grasp of reality? I'm willing to suspend judgement until I can hear more than just his word against the administration's.

[Sunstone]

I certainly don't think Pat Robertston is on a best friends basis with reality. In part, that's why I said "it deserves a look" rather than "I believe this". Anyway, I doubt there will be any conclussive proof of what Bush said or didn't say --- not unless someone recorded the conversation between Bush and Robertson.

[Faust]

What puzzles me is the administration insists we have to fight terrorism over there so we don't have to fight it here. In other words we have turned Iraq into an active battle field. Yet at the same time they insist that the invasion is justifiable because we are bringing democracy to the middle east.
How can you have it both ways? How do you democratize an active battle field?

[Mr Spinkles]

It's an ideological battlefield, Faust. Democracies tend not to give rise to international terrorism, as oppressive regimes do, because in democracies people have a voice in public policy that they can utilize without resorting to violence to be heard. There are people in Iraq now who are carrying out attacks for the sole purpose of derailing democracy in Iraq--because if democracy succeeds in Iraq, it will spread in the Middle East, and if democracy spreads there will be less terrorism. You fight terrorism by attacking its causes, not by trying to inspect every ship in every harbor in the U.S.

[Faust]

It's an ideological battlefield, Faust. Democracies tend not to give rise to international terrorism,
Yes but I would suggest that a large number of muslims see our actions as terrorism.(shock and awe) And we are trying to manipulate the field of political contenders in order to impose our desires on "their representative government". All justifications of the war in Iraq have fallen by the way side except fighting them there instead of here, and bringing them democracy. Ideological or not there are bullets bombs and destruction all around them and that doesn't seem like a very likely atmosphere to impose a totally foreign form of government on a people. Rather the two "objectives are opposing forces in Iraq.

[Faust]

Dear Mr. Sprinkles,
In a previous post I submited my limited understanding of "fundamentalizm".("Religious debates" under the thread "Are Christians under Attack" post heading "good thread pah".
In order to go deeper into Mr. Robertsons recent statements I would like to elaborate on that post here.
When a fundamentalist response takes place it normally occures within it's own bounderies.
This has been going on in the United States since the early seventies and has been occuring on multiple levels. Christianity against secularism, science, and Christian sects not allined with the fundamentalist movement and now between diverging fundalmentalist factions. Finally being externalized in a hybrid of cultural, corperate and religious self interests in an effort to impose what has become the dominant manifestation of American fundamentalist Christianity, militant Evangelizm, on the Middle East.( See "The Project for the New America Century") This doctrine frightens even other fundamentalists such as Mr. Robertson and a rift is developing in the conservative block in this country between the extreemists and not "so" extreemists.( See New York Times article, Without a Doubt, by Ron Suskind, Sunday, Oct. 17, 04)
I would ask at this point, if another country, say maybe China, suffered an attack by some militant group, decided to tople our government and use our country as a battlefield to fight their conflict and in order to justify it after all other reasons had proven unsubstantial proposed that they would "gift" us with their system of government as compensation for the destruction, how we as a people might feel about this turn of events?

[Mr Spinkles]

Originally Posted by Faust

Yes but I would suggest that a large number of muslims see our actions as terrorism.(shock and awe)

But we didn't really use "shock and awe" in this campaign. We relied heavily on special forces and elite units, working closely with Kurdish forces...the invasion was relatively surgical in nature.

Ugh...I'll respond to the rest of your posts some other time...too much religiousforums for one day.