Policing Debate (Moved from the Confessional Thread)

[Chula Vista]

Originally Posted by The Batlord

It also didn't seem much of a stretch to believe that Saddam was pursuing WMDs.

Fit the narrative for sure.

[Janszoon]

Originally Posted by The Batlord

Well, you lived in Boston at the time if I remember correctly (and if not, I want to say that Philly is a pretty liberal city), so I can imagine that there was more ambivalence in places like that. I'm sure that if the attack hadn't happened in New York there would have been more conflicted feelings over there as well. I remember MoveOn.Org being vocal about restraint, but I also remember them being seen as more of a joke than anything else.

I lived in Chicago at the time, which has a very wide range of political views in and around it.

Originally Posted by The Batlord

But I think a combination of the Rally 'Round the Flag effect, constant media footage of the Twin Towers in ruins/being hit by the planes, jingoistic rhetoric from politicians, several subsequent terrorist plots being foiled, and a general lack of familiarity with all but the basics of the modern history of the Middle East allowed for a less nuanced view of the situation.

Before 9/11 almost no one had ever even heard of Afghanistan -- maybe not even myself, even though I have/had a much better understanding of geography than my the vast majority of mouthbreathing fellows. A smaller, but still comparable number of people probably didn't even know the Soviet-Afghan War even happened, let alone our role in it.

People older than high school age were well aware of our previous involvement in Afghanistan. They even made a Rambo movie about it FFS.

Originally Posted by The Batlord

We knew that Iran and Saudi Arabia existed, and that they were ultra-religious places that your average American probably wouldn't want to spend a vacation, but we had little idea of the tenuous power balance/competition between them, along with Iraq, and their influence over the Middle East in general. So, I don't think we really thought much about the consequences throughout the region of toppling Saddam.

It also didn't seem much of a stretch to believe that Saddam was pursuing WMDs. He'd already used chemical weapons on his own people, and I really forget if he actually ever pursued nuclear technology at any point, but it certainly wasn't difficult to paint the situation in a way that made it look like he was/had.

I may have been a high schooler at the time of 9/11, and therefore in an environment that didn't lend itself to intellectual nuance, and was in military school when we invaded Iraq -- I say that due to the bubble world we lived in that really didn't leave us very aware of or interested in the outside world, and not so much because we were a bunch of pro-military, ultra-conservative ignoramuses (quite the opposite, in fact) -- so it's hard to say if the adults around us were as mindlessly gung ho as we were, but I never saw much evidence that they weren't.

Again, this was all in Virginia, but in a much more metropolitan, non-redneck good ol' boy part of the South than many of you might imagine. We're definitely more conservative than liberal, but we're still a swing state to an extent. And while Fishburne Military School, which was in VA, may have had a relatively high percentage of VA students, we also had many kids from all over the country, and plenty from other countries (including more than a few from the Middle East itself).

Again, I partly disagree. We weren't as blood thirsty at that point, but I think we were still perfectly willing to buy into the government's rhetoric. It was pretty explicitly implied that Saddam had harbored terrorists (which obviously turned out to be nonsense), for the most part nobody really questioned Saddam's involvement in WMDs, and the decade-long history of him thumbing his nose at UN resolutions about his military buildup had left the country without much sympathy for him. So, convincing the American public to go into Iraq wasn't really that hard.

A lot of people questioned the reasoning behind going into Iraq. I personally went to two enormous protest marches in DC about it in the months leading to the invasion, among other things. It was definitely a hotly debated topic and there was a large percentage of people who didn't buy into it.

[Chula Vista]

Originally Posted by Janszoon

A lot of people questioned the reasoning behind going into Iraq. I personally went to two enormous protest marches in DC about it in the months leading to the invasion, among other things. It was definitely a hotly debated topic and there was a large percentage of people who didn't buy into it.

OK, now I totally get your point.

I apologize for coming off as curt.

[Josef K]

Originally Posted by Janszoon

I don't think it's condescending. I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that adults are generally more clued in to the mood of the voting public than elementary or junior high school kids are. I'm sure, for example, you have a much clearer picture of the 1988 presidential campaign than I do since I was in junior high at the time and you were an adult.

Fair enough - I was a year old when 9/11 happened and so obviously I don't remember it at all. I do think it's a little unfair to say that people who weren't adults when something happened can't speak intelligently on history, but in this case since we are talking about how "the people" felt, I'll default to people like you who did live through that.

[fiddler]

I was in high school at the time, but in my part of the country, people were ticked, people were out for blood. I remember going to the mall maybe the winter afterwards and the line was wrapped around and outside the front doors. And yeah, when I turned 18 I was one of those hot headed teenagers. After going, and seeing all I've seen, do I regret joining the Army? No. Do I wish I hadn't been so hot headed and gung ho to do some shooting? Yup. It took me a while to learn it, but I've finally learned over the years that all human lives are valuable. All life is.

[John Wilkes Booth]

Originally Posted by tore

I'm with Fiddler on this. The job is to enforce the law and so that's what you do. If a constable gets to pick and choose what laws should be enforced, that hurts the integrity of the whole police force.

i actually agree with the sentiment that if you are a cop, you should enforce the law, as that is your job. i will say, however, that i would wager just about anything that every cop has at one point or another decided to 'look the other way' at least once in their career. this could mean not ticketing someone for jaywalking, not arresting someone for possession, etc.

the severity of the crime they are ignoring may vary, but i would be surprised if there are actually cops out there that always enforce every law with 100% consistency. so with this in mind, then if enforcing the law is 'doing your job' then any instance of you being lenient or not enforcing a particular law is you 'not doing your job.' so if you want to live up to the standard you are espousing, then you should avoid ever falling into this trap.

that being said... i do think that enforcing a law you think is wrong is compromising at least one of your principles. even if it is what you are supposed to do, as a cop. i'll back off on the whole career vs job argument, as i think that's a bit of a digression from the real point here, which is about compromising your principles. if you compromised them because being a cop is important to you for other reasons than money, then you still compromised them. i really don't see how that is any better tbh.

it could simply be that doing some jobs requires sometimes compromising on your ideals. i'm not actually judging cops/soldiers/politicians/whatever in making this statement, as i've been in the situation myself. a few examples come to mind...

working at walmart, i had to sell **** to people. i worked overnight and was the only one who could sell **** in electronics and run the register in sporting goods, etc. so there were a few items i had to sell to people that made me feel a bit uneasy. one of them was air duster, which kids use to get high on, and which causes permanent brain damage. i would sell it to them nonetheless, as long as they had ID, as it wasn't my job to deny sales or judge what people buy.

i also had to sell ammunition in the sporting goods section, which is all well and good if i'm selling it to a normal legal gun owner who's going to use them responsibly. but not all of the customers i had were like that. many of them were obviously gang members, and a few of them even had gang tattoos that i recognized because these gangs were based in the same neighborhood that i lived in. meanwhile, this kind of **** was on the local news almost constantly:



but once again, wasn't my job to judge who could and couldn't buy ammo, aside from checking ID. if you're of age, you can buy ammo; it's as simple as that.

i could try to wash my hands of any moral compromise and say hey i was just doing my job. but i can't deny that i basically did **** that i thought was (morally) the wrong thing to do. but the circumstances were such that doing so was the better option for me at the time. so i feel it's only honest to admit that i'm willing to compromise on my ideals for pragmatic reasons. i would honestly have nothing to say against cops or soldiers or politicians if they made a similar admission. and some of them probably do. but some of them don't. they assume a sort of moral infallibility in any case where they are following protocol, because the system is such that we literally need them to follow protocol for the system to function.

which is fine. i'm not decrying that fact, as i don't have a better solution. we need cops, and cops need to follow protocol. all i was saying is if the protocol conflicts with your own ideals then that requires compromising your ideals. it just is what it is. the world is a messy place.

that being said... i do understand why they have to sort of uphold the ideology that following protocol is never wrong... undermining this kind of thing can be subversive, and authoritarian systems can't tolerate such subversion. and police and military agencies are inherently authoritarian.

final disclaimer... nothing personal against fiddler or any other cop. i do generally get along with them as people. just my view on the nature of the system.

[John Wilkes Booth]

Originally Posted by The Batlord

I live in Virginia, and while we're not Alabama or Texas (), there wasn't much thought other than getting those mother****ers, at least in the first year or so. And considering Bush had a 90% approval rating at the time, I think that's probably pretty representative of where the country was as a whole.

Honestly, the government may very well have lied about WMDs in order to get us into Iraq, but we really didn't need all that much convincing at that point. They just had to imply a terrorist connection and we were perfectly happy to not think too hard about it.

iirc saddam basically admitted in court that he was purposely giving the impression that he still has WMD's because he didn't want to show any weakness to his iranian neighbors... so he was basically giving UN inspectors the runaround and acting shifty so he could maintain the process of getting out from under his sanctions while projecting the image to his enemies that he really did still have wmd's. wmd's were always central to saddam's geopolitical strategy, he saw them as his main source of geopolitical leverage. so even if he didn't have stockpiles lying around, he maintained the technological capability to rearm whenever necessary as soon as he was out from under his sanctions he most likely would have pursued some effort to reassert his strength, out of fear of iran. and iran would similarly be even more inclined to pursue their own nuclear ambitions out of fear of saddam. so it's pretty likely that with him still in power and (eventually) out from under UN sanctions, we would be looking at a nuclear arms race in the mid east. and with the ISIS situation, we still might... who knows?

[John Wilkes Booth]

also i should say, with the whole drug angle... i'm not sure that the drug war has nothing to do with the police and everything to do with politicians. i think the two are pretty well intertwined. i mean an entire police and prison industry is based in part on enforcing drug laws. in other words, there are a lot of police and prison jobs tied up in the continuation of current drug policies.

[Trollheart]

To give you a non-American view (and I would have been 38 at the time) we all felt horrible obviously that it happened, there was an outpouring of sympathy and solidarity with the USA, but then once you went after Saddam that was totally lost, and we shrugged and said "The Americans are doing what they like and using this tragedy as an excuse, a blank cheque". And just like that, opinion turned against you.

Had you gone for Afghanistan, Pakistan or even (HAH!) Saudi Arabia, you would have had some support and understanding. But we all knew Iraq was nothing more than a) revenge on Saddam by Bush and b) a grab for oil. Bush wasted any sympathy he had once he made that decision and invaded a country the US were not at war with at the time. Blair just went along with it and paid the price. We all knew that WMD stuff was pure crap, but I guess from your side, when you're hurting you just want to lash out at anyone. Hell, if Bush had said we did it you'd have supported an invasion of Ireland!

[Frownland]

Sounds like you mirror what a lot of Americans were thinking in Ireland. I was only seven at the time but I remember quite a bit about the subject surprisingly and that made up a good deal of the rhetoric I heard.