keith:

a) also supplying drugs and condoms does not preclude that bush is pushing his morally inspired nonsense. it's not either-or as you wish to pretend. the fact of the matter is that your claim that "he as president has never tried to impose his personal belief on his fellows" was simply wrong.

b) i, at least, never disagreed with your claim that bush should (nonetheless) be praised for his support of aids prevention in africa.

c) your broader claim, that bush will be seen as a "very successful president", is simply laughable. you're clearly not dumb, and it is such a monumentally dumb claim. this leads me to believe that even you don't believe it. i suspect you're merely supporting your team.

*and is the US or George's Strategy. Nothing to do with the Ugandans at all, Yabby.” *

Keith, the first of many of your mistakes. Perhaps you should do
some research after all. The ABC programme in Uganda was going
a long time before Bush came to office. It showed a decline in
hiv rates, until George changed the programme to A only, which then
saw rising HIV rates in Uganda.

But perhaps he forgot to look in his own backyard, which shows that
abstinence only programmes are a waste of time.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6554743.stm

*This indicates you now seem to want to change the discussion to one of promotion of sexual promiscuity.*

No, I want to show you want a dummie your hero really is. This is
just one of many many issues, where he has shown appalling judgement.
Seeing that he claims to ask his God for advice, perhaps he was
just given bad advice by those voices.

Yes, George gave some money to fight HIV in Africa, as he should have. We know from the stats that the US has always been lagging
in terms of $% of GDP given for development aid. The point is,
it sounds like a third of it was wasted and actually caused an
increase in the HIV rate in Uganda.

George did far more then stop money being spent on the abortions
in the third world. He applied the gag rule, result being
no family planning for many Africans. Abortions are one thing,
not even being allowed to mention them, is another. FYI here
are some of the results :

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3028820.stm

But I think that bushbasher is correct on this one. Even you
don't believe what a great prez that George has been, you
just enjoy an argument for the sake of it, as we have seen
before.

Just mindgames really.

Bushbasher-Yabby

You have put in much astute effort in trying to persuade Keith, maybe Keith is a quantum leap from our own universe in one of his own where Bush Jnr is wise and just ... well it is one explanation as his blind support for Bush defies reason in this universe.

Yabby, Bush has also tried to enforce his ideology on American women as well, not just Third World. I guess he likes to be consistent.

>>> But now women's choices are severely under threat. While women soldiers are paraded on Iraqi television, captured while serving their countries, their rights back home are in danger of being stripped away.
The irony is not lost on pro-choice advocates. Says Gloria Feldt, President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America: 'The women who have been deployed to Iraq to fight our war for us are not trusted by our government to make their own childbearing choices. Specifically, they are not allowed to obtain abortions in military hospitals while overseas.'

That choice could soon be taken away back home as well. Kate Michelman, President of NARAL Pro-Choice America, one of the leading advocacy organ-isations for abortion choice, sees what is happening as a full-scale assault, legally and legislatively' to reduce access to abortion. NARAL has identified 34 pieces of legislation introduced across America in 2002 which restrict women's right to abortion. Michelman says that if Bush stays in office, and the Republicans keep control of Congress, 'American women will lose the right to choose by 2008.'>>>

http://www.womens-health.org.nz/index.php?page=bush-s-war-on-women

OR Bush's ideology:

Bush: "I came to Washington with a set of values, and I'm leaving with the same set of values. And I darn sure wasn't going to sacrifice those values; that I was a president that had to make tough choices and was willing to make them,"

No, it wasn't a tough choice to invade Iraq or ignore Katrina or allow the financial system to run completely amuck.

It was a unique combination of stupidity and malevolence...

Cont'd

Cont'd

....which will be studied for centuries by historians struggling to imagine how such a person was ever given such power by a supposedly democratic people.

[Bush] did go to Washington with a certain set of values -- after all he'd signed over 150 death warrants without even reading the paperwork. That's exactly the kind of person who would legalize torture and suspend the constitution. And naturally a man who would steal an election and then govern like he'd won in a partisan landslide would politicize the Justice Department.... anyone who would hire a thug like Karl Rove could be expected to spy on Americans and use the presidency for political purposes.

Yes, his values are intact, no doubt about it, and his legacy is intact<<<

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/109187/bush%27s_delusional_take_on_his_legacy/

On redefining reality:

>>> Words in a Time of War: Taking on the President's Rhetoric

By Mark Danner

Never has an administration reached for its dictionaries more regularly to redefine reality to its own benefit.......

I give you my favorite-quotation from the Bush-administration, put forward by the proverbial "unnamed-Administratio-official" and published in the NewYork-Times Magazine by the fine journalist Ron Suskind in October 2004. Here, in Suskind's recounting, is what that "unnamed Administration official" told him:

"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors.... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'" <<<

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/52794/words_in_a_time_of_war%3A_taking_on_the_president%27s_rhetoric/?page=entire

Liberal, my figures were not plucked out of the air.

The estimate over 1 million Iraqi deaths (1,297,997 now) as a result of the invasion comes from the page http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq/counterexplanation.html which in turn cites a study in the medical journal the Lancet (pdf not available freely any more as far as I can tell but can be obtained through http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0140673604174412) which put the toll as of July 2006 at 650,000

To quote from the above page: "Due to an escalating mortality rate, the researchers estimated that over 650,000 Iraqis had died who would not have died had the death rate remained at pre-invasion levels. Roughly 601,000 of those excess deaths were due to violence."

Other studies cited by "Just Foreign Policy" put the toll even higher:

http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq/iraqdeaths.html
"Opinion Research Business (http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=78) estimated that 1.2 million Iraqis have been killed violently since the US-led invasion."

---

As for the figures of deaths under Saddam Hussein's rule:

Firstly, you haven't provided the source (which is exaclty what you have accused me of doing) and secondly you have failed to note that the figures confirm my point that Saddam Hussein cannot be personally held responsible for all the deaths.

Clearly he started the war of aggression against Iran (but the US were quite happy that he did at the time), but after the tide turned against Iraq, the Iranian mullahs, probably for cynical domestic reasons, needlessly prolonged the conflict and ignored Hussein's overtures for peace, thereby needlessly adding hundreds of thousands to the death toll.

And why should Hussein himself, and not the UN be personally held responsible for the approximately 500,000 Iraqi children dead because of international trade sanctions introduced following the Gulf War?

Also, it is questionable that Hussein should be personally held responsible for the deaths that resulted form his occupation of Kuwait as it appears that he may have been set up in 1990 by Kuwait's slant drilling into Iraq's oil fields and deliberately tricked into believing that the US would not intervene if Iraq invaded Kuwait by US ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Glaspie#Meetings_with_Saddam_Hussein)

(tobcontinued)

(continuedfromabove)

Also, given that the US led the Iraqis and Shiites believe that they would aid any uprising against Hussein in 1991 after the defeat of his armies in Kuwait, but did not, why should the US not also be held culpable for the resultant bloodshed?

---

What was needed in 2003 is a calm discussion about the human rights situation in Iraq and acknowledgement that the deaths attributed to Hussein in the past were in the context of conflicts which other parties had also helped to inflame.

At the time, there seemed to be no human rights emergency of which I am aware, which could only have been remedied with an invasion.

Given the ensuing death toll and human misery, the invasion and the overall meddling by the US in the Gulf over the last 20 odd years has clearly made the situation almost immeasurably worse.