Here in Germany the global warming is true sometimes in summer. But in winter? Never!

Since about ten years the global average temperature is falling and the CO2 level in the atmosphere is rising.

Result: There is and there was no man made global warming at all.

Best regards
Konrad

Heck, we can’t even predict that lending $500,000 to a man making $30,000 will result in foreclosures and leveraging this “investment” 20 times will cause major investment banks to go bankrupt!

Its just improper use of stats to prove a point to make money. Gore is reported to have made $100 million from his global warming campaign.

I don’t take issue with having a strong military, so long as it is used for national defense, rather than foreign military interventionism and preemptive war. The part that bothers me in the quote is the need for a “nonmilitary deployable police force to train forces and help maintain law and order” around the world. Where does the constitution give the federal government the authority to establish an international police force? Do we really intend to spend the blood and treasure of US citizens enforcing law and order around the globe? Constitutionality aside, such a policy strikes me as clearly unsustainable.

I take issue with you labeling my cause as worthless without having the intellectual courage to identify what it is about my cause that you find so worthless. My cause of individual responsibility, personal freedom, and constitutional government is far broader than foreign non-interventionism. Even if you disagree with me on foreign policy, I think if you were honest with yourself, you would find that you are actually in agreement with me on many, though not all, issues.

Obviously Iraqi public opinion needs to be considered even if it’s only on a strategic & tactical level, i.e. “this is the lay of the land we face if we stay”. One can’t ever ignore it.

But I do think it’s appropriate that U.S. Presidential candidates put a premium on what the American people want. Try this thought experiment: suppose poll-measured Iraqi public opinion were currently heavily, heavily in *favor* of the U.S. military presence; would you now be arguing that, despite domestic opposition in the U.S., we should ‘listen to the Iraqis’ and stay against the wishes of the majority here? Probably not. We’re the ones footing the bill & sending our soldiers, so how we feel about doing so ought to take priority IMHO. (And I say that even though I am in the minority which doesn’t favor withdrawal, and think the majority of the American people are wrong and misguided in their frustration and impatience with the military presence there.)

There is also a bit of a problem with establishing a rule in postwar reconstructions/counterinsurgencies that ‘we can’t stay if they don’t want us to’. Suppose a poll of Germans in 1946 found they ‘wanted us to leave’ (as it might well have), should that have compelled us to leave? I can’t quite sign onto that precedent. We have an independent interest in the outcome of the power vacuum in Iraq, i.e. we cannot sit and watch some sort of Al Qaedastan form, and this is true even if ‘the Iraqi people’ ‘don’t want us there’.

BTW: The UN mandate I spoke of didn’t “declare war on our behalf”. It’s not a “declaration of war” mandate at all (if there is such a thing), it rather speaks of things such as the need for help with security, training, etc. and was formally requested by the government of Iraq.

news article – http://www.iraqupdates.com/p_articles.php/article/25958
text of resolution 1790 – http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/mnfrenewal/2007/1218resolution.pdf

As you recall, when we *did* declare war on and invade Iraq this was done with no explicit UN approval. So in neither case (the 2003 war, or the postwar reconstruction/counterinsurgency) have we ceded to the UN our power to declare war, which I agree would be wrong.

You raise a fair question about the WMDs, I probably will write about it on my site at some point and explain my views at greater length but I don’t want to hog your comments section more than I already have. The short answer is that I never considered “WMDs” to be “the justification for the invasion of Iraq”, I considered them to be simply the “case” Bush tried to present *to the UN Security Council* for why *they* should approve our invasion. Which, they didn’t. In other words, the “WMDs” argument was a dead-letter in my mind anyway: we had a bunch of stuff on Hussein, but (for whatever reason) when we got to the “court” that is the UN Security Council, the only (failed) “charges” we tried to bring against him were “WMDs”. Oh well. As you can guess I consider this UN “case” to be completely separate from the domestic “case”, which was based on more than merely asserting that the Hussein regime possessed functional WMDs (read, for example, the War Powers Resolution). But I understand the disagreement on this point and reasonable people do have big problems with my POV, and have for five years, in well-worn arguments, so I don’t expect agreement here

Thank *you* for the response and I do appreciate your (probably more so) civil tone as well, it’s like a breath of fresh air. I’ll certainly come back to this blog. Best,