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Rail Baron
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Originally Posted by roachboy
stevo:
fill me in exactly on how the reagan support of iraq fits into the cold war. not all geopolitics of the early 1980s fits. the iran-iraq war doesnt. so i dont see your point, really. explain more perhaps?
sorry if i impugned you by associating you with ann coulter. it just happened that i looked her up for some reason and then saw your post and voila there it was, the two of you really close to each other in terms of position--specifically the remark about the dark ages..
and i re-read the rest of your post, and you are not really so far from her....have a look at this anti-ac site..which is pretty amateurish and only interesting for the quotes..but it gives an idea of why i say what i do:
http://www.therationalradical.com/di...nn_coulter.htm
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i do have one question, however: i was watching "control room" the other night--a great documentary, btw, about al jazeera--the people who were at the center of the film were watching footage of the americans going into baghdad. they kept asking "where is the army? where is the republican guard"? and i keep wondering the same thing--where is the iraqi army? where is the republican guard? what make you think that the "insurgency" is not being waged by them? i know what the bushites would have you believe, but it just makes no sense to me. i dont know if this is a good thread to pose this question, nor do i actually address it to you specifically, stevo. but it just strikes me as odd, this word "insurgency," this insistence on "foreign elements"....the iraqi army simply disappeared...they couldnt have simply ceased to exist---so where are they? |
Wow...um lets see if I can explain this. During the 1980's Iran was our enemy. Iran committed numerous acts that went against our interests. (see below). During that time (the cold-war era, as I put it before) the enemy of our enemy was our friend. That means since Iraq was at war with our enemy, Iran, that we went ahead and aided Iraq in their fight against Iran. Read this, it explains a lot.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/arti...9/102451.shtml
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Iran Number One Enemy
John LeBoutillier
Monday, Nov. 29, 2004
February 1979 - in Tehran - the War Against the West began.
The Shah of Iran had been deposed - in large part because a rube President Jimmy Carter, who couldn’t even name the leaders of crucial countries when he took office and who pulled the plug on our decades-long support for the Shah’s government - and the Ayatollah Khomeini had returned from exile in a tent outside Paris to crowds of millions along the route from the airport.
It was a scene that would effect us all for decades to come.
Khomeini instituted a total Fundamentalist Islamic Revolution that took a modern, secular Persian society and turned it into a backward, repressive society which treated women as third-class citizens and set about destroying American and Western influence in the Middle East.
We first became directly involved when the American Embassy was stormed on November 4, 1979 and the 53 hostages seized.
That first hostile act against the United States was the Declaration of War that launched 25 years of hostilities from Tehran against America and her allies.
Hostage-taking in the 1980's by Iran-sponsored Hezbollah in Lebanon, numerous world-wide terrorist actions (Germany, France, Scotland, Saudi Arabia), tons of guns and bombs shipped to the PLO and wholesale support for fundamentalist Muslim terror groups are the result of the Ayatollah’s 1979 ascendancy to power.
Today Iran - not Iraq - is the Number One Threat to this country.
Awash in oil, they are building - with help from Russia - nuclear power plants which produce the key ingredients to manufacture nuclear bombs. Now, why do you suppose they are doing that?
Perhaps to give/sell/trade these weapons to subsidiary groups to use against the United States and her allies? And to increase their ‘legitimate’ standing in the world community? (After all, they have learned that the USA only attacks non-nuclear nations.)
The Bush-led focus in this country on Iraq has been a bit misguided. In the 1980's the Reagan Administration saw Iran as the Big Threat and thus quietly aided Saddam as a way to ‘block’ Iran from its adventurism.
The first President Bush did not continue on to Baghdad at the end of the Gulf War precisely because he knew that without that ‘check’ in Baghdad Iran would be free to roam about the region.
Today it is becoming clearer by the day: the 60% of the Iraqi population - the Shia Muslims - want their election to be held on January 30th because they know they will win it. And, once in power, they will form a loose alliance with their fundamentalist brethren in Tehran. The combined oil reserves of Iran and Iraq will make OPEC look like a pauper!
Iran will have gotten just what she has wanted for more than 20 years: a foothold on Arab territory and even more influence in the oil community. And America will have given this to Iran - through the blood of our soldiers, the money of the American taxpayers, and the tragic ignorance and miscalculation of yet another President who knows little about the Mid-East.
What happens if Ayatollah Sistani’s Shia party wins the majority of seats in the Iraqi government - as is very likely in January (why else do all the Kurdish and Sunni parties want the election delayed for 6 months?) - and the new, now-sovereign Iraqi government says to Washington, “We thank you for deposing Saddam and his evil sons and Ba’ath Party, but now we ask that you pack up your troops and leave Muslim territory in 30 days.”
What will we do then?
Will we have, in fact, helped the Iranians and the fundamentalist Muslims to expand their reach and power in the Middle East?
Will the new Iraqi Government actually be more of a threat to the United States than even Saddam was?
Will the combined Iran-Iraq oil monster wreak havoc on our economy through higher oil prices - or perhaps even induced ‘shortages’?
What began in 1979 is still with us. But we are now about to witness - and indirectly assist - Iran expand its power and reach.
What a tragic miscalculation.
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And here's a brief history of US DIA efforts in the 1980's if you're interested: http://www.fas.org/irp/dia/product/p...tory_1980.html
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DIA's publication in 1981 of the first in a series of white papers on the strengths and capabilities of Soviet military forces titled, "Soviet Military Power", met with wide acclaim. Ten such booklets were published subsequently over roughly the next decade. In April of 1981, the Agency broke ground for the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center (DIAC) at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C. World crisis continued to flare and included the downing of two Libyan SU-22's by American F-14's over the Gulf of Sidra, an Israeli F-16 raid to destroy an Iranian nuclear reactor, two Iranian hijacking, Iranian air raids on Kuwait, and the release of American hostages in Iran.
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Closer to home, many of DIA's major functional elements were finally consolidated under one roof when the Agency dedicated the DIAC at Bolling AFB on 23 May 1984. Other DIA analytical efforts during the mid-1980's centered on the attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon, the Iran Irac War, the conflict in Afghanistan, the Soviet shootdown Korean Air Lines Flight 007, the civil war in Chad, and unrest in the Philippines.
Indeed, the significantly large number of hijacking, bombings, kidnapping, murders, and other acts of terrorism led to 1985 being characterized the "Year of the Terrorist." Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger presented DIA with the Agency's first Joint Meritorious Unit Award in 1986 for outstanding intelligence support over the previous year during a series of crises--the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the cruise ship ACHILLEA LAURO, unrest in the Philippines, and counterterrorist operations against Libya.
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ps. I now take your Ann Coulter comments as a complement. Thank you.
edit-spelling mistake
Last edited by stevo22; 12-21-2004 at 08:58 PM..
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