>
> >As I said. But in fact the pressure on Iraq has
> everything to dow ith money and >power.
>
> I think it has more to do with eliminating a threat
> both to the US and Iraq's neighbors.
If you believe that you'll fall or anything. I mean, do we have to start with lessons in imperialisma nd US foreign policy 101? There are no threats posed by Irq or any other strate to the security of the US,a nd never have been. Insosofar as the US cares about whether Iraq invades anyone else, it's because of oil, namely, the US wants to make sure that it retains indirect control over the oil fields in Saudi, Kuwait, etc., and indeed regains them wrt to Irq, so it has leverage over the EU and Japan,w hich (unlike the US) depend on Middle Eastern Oil. The US does not care about state sovereignty, human rights, freedom, justice, or democracy, It cares about money and power. This should be so obvious here as not to have to be said.
>
> >I should have known, you're that sort sort
> utilitarian. Take "moral responsibility" just >to
> mean "subject to moral evaluation," whatever you
> think that amounts to.
>
> Not very much. I do, however, think it's important
> that agents feel as though they are morally
> responsible.
I love utilitarianism. It's based on a lie: people are
required to believe something that it holds to be
false.
>
> >Well, we do that because we believe in moral
> responsibility ;); but the abalogy is >defective.
> ATtempted murder involves an attempt to have a
> certain effect, a killing. >Taking the early flight
> on Sept 11 was not a failed attempt to kill more
> people.
>
> I was responding to what I took to be a general
> claim on your part, i.e. that we should gauge the
> severity of a threat based upon actual consequences
> in the past as opposed to "what might have happened
> but didn't." In probably a majority of cases that's
> an excellent rule of thumb, but in a non-trivial
> minority it's clearly ludicrous.
You haven't even tried to show that this is one of these. But suppose that al Q had killed 50,000 people on Sept 11. Why does thats how that it would be efficious or wise, given the other costs in tersm of freedom and money, to go to war with -- whom, Iraq? -- to combat this menace? The embedded question shows that war is, as usual, not thea nswer. Here we don't even have a real target.
jks
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