One year of war - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

Strange Famous · 03-12-2004, 03:13 PM

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The Empire Backfires

Jonathan Schell, The Nation's peace and disarmament correspondent, is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute and the author, most recently, of the just-published The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People.

The first anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq has arrived. By now, we were told by the Bush administration before the war, the flower-throwing celebrations of our troops' arrival would have long ended; their numbers would have been reduced to the low tens of thousands, if not to zero; Iraq's large stores of weapons of mass destruction would have been found and dismantled; the institutions of democracy would be flourishing; Kurd and Shiite and Sunni would be working happily together in a federal system; the economy, now privatized, would be taking off; other peoples of the Middle East, thrilled and awed, so to speak, by the beautiful scenes in Iraq, would be dismantling their own tyrannical regimes. Instead, 549 American soldiers and uncounted thousands of Iraqis, military and civilian, have died; some $125 billion has been expended; no weapons of mass destruction have been found; the economy is a disaster; electricity and water are sometime things; America's former well-wishers, the Shiites, are impatient with the occupation; terrorist bombs are taking a heavy toll; and Iraq as a whole, far from being a model for anything, is a cautionary lesson in the folly of imperial rule in the twenty-first century. And yet all this is only part of the cost of the decision to invade and occupy Iraq. To weigh the full cost, one must look not just at the war itself but away from it, at the progress of the larger policy it served, at things that have been done elsewhere—some far from Iraq or deep in the past—and, perhaps above all, at things that have been left undone.

Nuclear Fingerprints

While American troops were dying in Baghdad and Falluja and Samarra, Buhary Syed Abu Tahir, a Sri Lankan businessman, was busy making centrifuge parts in Malaysia and selling them to Libya and Iran and possibly other countries. The centrifuges are used for producing bomb-grade uranium. Tahir's project was part of a network set up by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the "father" of the Pakistani atomic bomb. This particular father stole most of the makings of his nuclear offspring from companies in Europe, where he worked during the 1980s. In the 1990s, the thief became a middleman—a fence—immensely enriching himself in the process. In fairness to Khan, we should add that almost everyone who has been involved in developing atomic bombs since 1945 has been either a thief or a borrower. Stalin purloined a bomb design from the United States, courtesy of the German scientist Klaus Fuchs, who worked on the Manhattan Project. China got help from Russia until the Sino-Soviet split put an end to it. Pakistan got secret help from China in the early 1970s. And now it turns out that Khan, among many, many other Pakistanis, almost certainly including the highest members of the government, has been helping Libya, Iran, North Korea and probably others obtain the bomb. That's apparently how Chinese designs—some still in Chinese—were found in Libya when its quixotic leader, Muammar Qaddafi, recently agreed to surrender his country's nuclear program to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The rest of the designs were in English.

Were Klaus Fuchs's fingerprints on them? Only figuratively, because they were "copies of copies of copies," an official said. But such is the nature of proliferation. It is mainly a transfer of information from one mind to another. Copying is all there is to it. Sometimes, a bit of hardware needs to be transferred, which is where Tahir came in. Indeed, at least seven countries are already known to have been involved in the Pakistani effort, which Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the IAEA, called a "Wal-Mart" of nuclear technology and an American official called "one-stop shopping" for nuclear weapons. Khan even printed a brochure with his picture on it listing all the components of nuclear weapons that bomb-hungry customers could buy from him. "What Pakistan has done," the expert on nuclear proliferation George Perkovich, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has rightly said, "is the most threatening activity of proliferation in history. It's impossible to overstate how damaging this is."

Another word for this process of copying would be globalization. Proliferation is merely globalization of weapons of mass destruction. The kinship of the two is illustrated by other details of Tahir's story. The Sri Lankan first wanted to build his centrifuges in Turkey, but then decided that Malaysia had certain advantages. It had recently been seeking to make itself into a convenient place for Muslims from all over the world to do high-tech business. Controls were lax, as befits an export platform. "It's easy, quick, efficient. Do your business and disappear fast, in and out," Karim Raslan, a Malaysian columnist and social commentator, recently told Alan Sipress of The Washington Post. Probably that was why extreme Islamist organizations, including Al Qaeda operatives, had often chosen to meet there. Global terrorism is a kind of globalization, too. The linkup of such terrorism and the world market for nuclear weapons is a specter that haunts the world of the twenty-first century.

The War and Its Aims

But aren't we supposed to be talking about the Iraq war on this anniversary of its launch? We are, but wars have aims, and the declared aim of this one was to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. In his State of the Union address in January 2002, the President articulated the threat he would soon carry out in Iraq: "The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons." Later, he said we didn't want the next warning to be "a mushroom cloud." Indeed, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State Colin Powell explicitly ruled out every other justification for the war. Asked about the other reasons, he said, "The President has not linked authority to go to war to any of those elements." When Sen. John Kerry explained his vote for the resolution authorizing the war, he cited the Powell testimony. Thus not only Bush but also the man likely to be his Democratic challenger in this year's election justified war solely in the name of nonproliferation.

Proliferation, however, is not, as the president seemed to think, just a rogue state or two seeking weapons of mass destruction; it is the entire half-century-long process of globalization that stretches from Klaus Fuchs's espionage to Tahir's nuclear arms bazaar and beyond. The war was a failure in its own terms because weapons of mass destruction were absent in Iraq; the war policy failed because they were present and spreading in Pakistan. For Bush's warning of a mushroom cloud over an American city, though false with respect to Iraq, was indisputably well-founded in regard to Pakistan's nuclear one-stop-shopping: The next warning stemming from this kind of failure could indeed be a mushroom cloud.

The questions that now cry out to be answered are, Why did the United States, standing in the midst of the Pakistani nuclear Wal-Mart, its shelves groaning with, among other things, centrifuge parts, uranium hexafluoride (supplied, we now know, to Libya) and helpful bomb-assembly manuals in a variety of languages, rush out of the premises to vainly ransack the empty warehouse of Iraq? What sort of nonproliferation policy could lead to actions like these? How did the Bush administration, in the name of protecting the country from nuclear danger, wind up leaving it wide open to nuclear danger?

In answering these questions, it would be reassuring, in a way, to report that the basic facts were discovered only after the war, but the truth is otherwise. In the case of Iraq, it's now abundantly clear that some combination of deception, self-deception and outright fraud (the exact proportions of each are still under investigation) led to the manufacture of a gross and avoidable falsehood. In the months before the war, most of the governments of the world strenuously urged the United States not to go to war on the basis of the flimsy and unconvincing evidence it was offering. In the case of Pakistan, the question of how much the administration knew before the war has scarcely been asked, yet we know that the most serious breach—the proliferation to North Korea—was reported and publicized before the war.

It's important to recall the chronology of the Korean aspect of Pakistan's proliferation. In January 2003 Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that Pakistan had given North Korea extensive help with its nuclear program, including its launch of a uranium enrichment process. In return, North Korea was sending guided missiles to Pakistan. In June 2002, Hersh revealed, the CIA had sent the White House a report on these developments. On Oct. 4, 2002, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs James Kelly confronted the North Koreans with the CIA information, and, according to Kelly, North Korea's First Vice Foreign Minister, Kang Suk Ju, startled him by responding, "Of course we have a nuclear program." (Since then, the North Koreans have unconvincingly denied the existence of the uranium enrichment program.)

Bush of course had already named the Pyongyang government as a member of the "axis of evil." It had long been the policy of the United States that nuclearization of North Korea was intolerable. However, the administration said nothing of the North Korean events to the Congress or the public. North Korea, which now had openly embarked on nuclear armament, and was even threatening to use nuclear weapons, was more dangerous than Saddam's Iraq. Why tackle the lesser problem in Iraq, the members of Congress would have had to ask themselves, while ignoring the greater in North Korea? On Oct. 10, a week after the Kelly visit, the House of Representatives passed the Iraq resolution, and the next day the Senate followed suit. Only five days later, on Oct. 16, did Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, reveal what was happening in North Korea.

In short, from June 2002, when the CIA delivered its report to the White House, until Oct. 16—the period in which the nation's decision to go to war in Iraq was made—the administration knowingly withheld the news about North Korea and its Pakistan connection from the public. Even after the vote, Secretary of State Colin Powell strangely insisted that the North Korean situation was "not a crisis" but only "a difficulty." Nevertheless, he extracted a pledge from Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, that the nuclear technology shipments to North Korea would stop. (They did not.) In March, information was circulating that both Pakistan and North Korea were helping Iran to develop atomic weapons. (The North Korean and Iranian crises are of course still brewing.)

In sum, the glaring contradiction between the policy of "regime change" for already disarmed Iraq and regime-support for proliferating Pakistan was not a postwar discovery; it was fully visible before the war. The Nation enjoys no access to intelligence files, yet in an article arguing the case against the war, this author was able to comment that an "objective ranking of nuclear proliferators in order of menace" would put "Pakistan first," North Korea second, Iran third and Iraq only fourth—and to note the curiosity that "the Bush administration ranks them, of course, in exactly the reverse order, placing Iraq, which it plans to attack, first, and Pakistan, which it befriends and coddles, nowhere on the list." Was nonproliferation, then, as irrelevant to the administration's aims in Iraq as catching terrorists? Or was protecting the nation and the world against weapons of mass destruction merely deployed as a smokescreen to conceal other purposes? And if so, what were they?

A New Leviathan

The answers seem to lie in the larger architecture of the Bush foreign policy, or Bush Doctrine. Its aim, which many have properly called imperial, is to establish lasting American hegemony over the entire globe, and its ultimate means is to overthrow regimes of which the United States disapproves, pre-emptively if necessary. The Bush Doctrine indeed represents more than a revolution in American policy; if successful, it would amount to an overturn of the existing international order. In the new, imperial order, the United States would be first among nations, and force would be first among its means of domination. Other, weaker nations would be invited to take their place in shifting coalitions to support goals of America's choosing. The United States would be so strong, the President has suggested, that other countries would simply drop out of the business of military competition, "thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace." Much as, in the early modern period, when nation-states were being born, absolutist kings, the masters of overwhelming military force within their countries, in effect said, "There is now a new thing called a nation; a nation must be orderly; we kings, we sovereigns, will assert a monopoly over the use of force, and thus supply that order," so now the United States seemed to be saying, "There now is a thing called globalization; the global sphere must be orderly; we, the sole superpower, will monopolize force throughout the globe, and thus supply international order."

And so, even as the Bush administration proclaimed U.S. military superiority, it pulled the country out of the world's major peaceful initiatives to deal with global problems—withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol to check global warming and from the International Criminal Court, and sabotaging a protocol that would have given teeth to the biological weapons convention. When the U.N. Security Council would not agree to American decisions on war and peace, it became "irrelevant"; when NATO allies balked, they became "old Europe." Admittedly, these existing international treaties and institutions were not a full-fledged cooperative system; rather, they were promising foundations for such a system. In any case, the administration wanted none of it.

Richard Perle, who until recently served on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, seemed to speak for the administration in an article he wrote for the Guardian the day after the Iraq war was launched. He wrote, "The chatterbox on the Hudson [sic] will continue to bleat. What will die is the fantasy of the U.N. as the foundation of a new world order. As we sift the debris, it will be important to preserve, the better to understand, the intellectual wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions."

In this larger plan to establish American hegemony, the Iraq war had an indispensable role. If the world was to be orderly, then proliferation must be stopped; if force was the solution to proliferation, then pre-emption was necessary (to avoid that mushroom cloud); if pre-emption was necessary, then regime change was necessary (so the offending government could never build the banned weapons again); and if all this was necessary, then Iraq was the one country in the world where it all could be demonstrated. Neither North Korea nor Iran offered an opportunity to teach these lessons—the first because it was capable of responding with a major war, even nuclear war, and the second because even the administration could see that U.S. invasion would be met with fierce popular resistance. It's thus no accident that the peril of weapons of mass destruction was the sole justification in the two legal documents by which the administration sought to legitimize the war—HJ Resolution 114 and Security Council Resolution 1441. Nor is it an accident that the proliferation threat played the same role in the domestic political campaign for the war—by forging the supposed link between the "war on terror" and nuclear danger. In short, absent the new idea that proliferation was best stopped by pre-emptive use of force, the new American empire would have been unsalable, to the American people or to Congress. Iraq was the foundation stone of the bid for global empire.

The reliance on force over cooperation that was writ large in the imperial plan was also writ small in the occupation of Iraq. How else to understand the astonishing failure to make any preparation for the political, military, policing and even technical challenges that would face American forces? If a problem, large or small, had no military solution, this administration seemed incapable of even seeing it. The United States was as blind to the politics of Iraq as it was to the politics of the world.

Thus we don't have to suppose that Bush officials were indifferent to the spectacular dangers that Khan's network posed to the safety of the United States and the world or that the Iraqi resistance would pose to American forces. We only have to suppose that they were simply unable to recognize facts they had failed to acknowledge in their overarching vision of a new imperial order. In both cases, ideology trumped reality.

The same pattern is manifest on an even larger scale. Just now, the peoples of the world have embarked, some willingly and some not, on an arduous, wrenching, perilous, mind-exhaustingly complicated process of learning how to live as one indivisibly connected species on our one small, endangered planet. Seen in a certain light, the administration's imperial bid, if successful, would amount to a kind of planetary coup d'état, in which the world's dominant power takes charge of this process by virtue of its almost freakishly superior military strength. Seen in another, less dramatic light, the American imperial solution has interposed a huge, unnecessary roadblock between the world and the Himalayan mountain range of urgent tasks that it must accomplish no matter who is in charge: saving the planet from overheating; inventing a humane, just, orderly, democratic, accountable global economy; redressing mounting global inequality and poverty; responding to human rights emergencies, including genocide; and, of course, stopping proliferation as well as rolling back the existing arsenals of nuclear arms. None of these exigencies can be met as long as the world and its greatest power are engaged in a wrestling match over how to proceed.

Does the world want to indict and prosecute crimes against humanity? First, it must decide whether the International Criminal Court will do the job or entrust it to unprosecutable American forces. Do we want to reverse global warming and head off the extinction of the one-third of the world's species that, according to a report published in Nature magazine, are at risk in the next 50 years? First, the world's largest polluter has to be drawn into the global talks. Do we want to save the world from weapons of mass destruction? First, we have to decide whether we want to do it together peacefully or permit the world's only superpower to attempt it by force of arms.

No wonder, then, that the administration, as reported by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in these pages, has mounted an assault on the scientific findings that confirm these dangers to the world [see "The Junk Science of George W. Bush," March 8]. The United States' destructive hyperactivity in Iraq cannot be disentangled from its neglect of global warming. Here, too, ideology is the enemy of fact, and empire is the nemesis of progress.

If the engine of a train suddenly goes off the rails, a wreck ensues. Such is the war in Iraq, now one year old. At the same time, the train's journey forward is canceled. Such is the current paralysis of the international community. Only when the engine is back on the tracks and starts in the right direction can either disaster be overcome. Only then will everyone be able to even begin the return to the world's unfinished business.

This article first appeared in The Nation and is reprinted with permission.

http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/10090

Lebell · 03-12-2004, 03:51 PM

Do you have any comment of your own to add? It would be interesting to hear.

Strange Famous · 03-12-2004, 04:09 PM

Well, clearly the world is a more dangerous place than it was a year ago, Iraq has merely been turned from a docile but internally brutally repressive regime to an explosive virtual civil war, the atomic bomb cannot be prevented and WILL spread further throughout the world... I found the idea of America as seeing itself as some kind of Hobbsian Leviathan on an international scale is interesting (and the Leviathan is as much an influance on my political thinking as Das Kapital)... but my gut feeling is that this war was about oil most of all, but I think an element of it was an example to the rest of the world, a punishment beating, to show everyone - "if you disobey American power, you will be beaten, you will be destroyed".

of course, as much as we understand that this war was wrong and unjust and has killed thousands of civilians, we must also never keep out of mind that Hussain was a corrupt and blood thirsty butcher who was despised by most ordinary Iraqi's... in fact, the only thing that kept him in power was people felt they had to unite behind him because he could stand up to America (of course, he couldnt...)

I dont see any legitimate self defence motive for the war... the people who attacked America came from Saudi Arabia, so attacking Iraq made no sense... Iraq had no real WMD programme, we know this now, but they probably wanted one and would have tried to build one if the UN had left them alone... but there are many other states more dangerous to America who do have WMD's programmes, and the point is they CANT be stopped, the knowledge (and lets face it, these weapons were usually invented by either Russia or America) cannot be erased...

To me, the article was interested, and I think when we consider the motives for the attack on Iraq, it does give a very plausible possible explanation (other than the most obvious, which is either oil, or Bush really believed Iraq was about to launch a chemical weapons attack on America, and which one of those you find more believable probably depends more on your world view rather than logic)

irateplatypus · 03-12-2004, 04:11 PM

One year of war?
Why didn't anyone tell me?!?!

The last war I heard of was when the US rolled through Iraq with a coalition of forces in a couple weeks last year. You know, the one where we are spending our own tax dollars to get another country back online and prospering. Gosh, I should watch more CNN or something.

"...docile but internally brutally repressive regime to an explosive virtual civil war"

strange famous, i'm sorry to call you out again man... there is no malice in it. that just isn't true.

Lebell · 03-12-2004, 04:14 PM

Thank you

Strange Famous · 03-12-2004, 04:22 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by irateplatypus

"...docile but internally brutally repressive regime to an explosive virtual civil war"

strange famous, i'm sorry to call you out again man... there is no malice in it. that just isn't true.

People are being killed in Iraq every day by this conflict, the country is still under the military rule of a foriegn power, the various factions cannot make peace with each other, terrorist attacks strike on an almost daily basis... American soldiers are being murdered every week, there are widespread shortages of many things, no clear leadership and no prospect of it, the three major players in Iraqi social life gearing up for a fight... is this what you call peace and rebuilding? Iraq is on the verge of all out implosion, and is only being held together by an occupation force of soldiers who are hated by most of the people there. Meanwhile, Iraqi natural resouces are being exploited by American corporations (as opposed to Hussain's ruling party) and the people are as poor as ever.

Ustwo · 03-12-2004, 04:31 PM

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strange famous, i'm sorry to call you out again man... there is no malice in it. that just isn't true.

You have to understand 1000's of people being murdered by the government and put into mass graves on an ongoing basis is something communists understand and approve of, hence Saddam was ok.

A few 100 people being murdered by remnants of said regime along with some imported terrorists while they work out a republic is an 'explosive civil war'.

Frankly I don't care what the left thinks, I've given up trying to figure out how the brain of a communist works and think of it as some sort of mental illness.

Zeld2.0 · 03-12-2004, 05:02 PM

The left is always communist huh. The ones who question a few policies are communists now by your logic?

Bullshit anyways, call people whatever you want, but call people who have lost family members against "communists" in other nations - call people who have fought in other people's civil wars against those communists - then thats just plain fucking stupid.

Ustwo · 03-12-2004, 05:09 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Zeld2.0
The left is always communist huh. The ones who question a few policies are communists now by your logic?

Bullshit anyways, call people whatever you want, but call people who have lost family members against "communists" in other nations - call people who have fought in other people's civil wars against those communists - then thats just plain fucking stupid.

Nothing like someone being a bit oversensative. I don't care what the left thinks anymore, they are to be defeated in the ballot box and anywhere else they challange, but I can put my mind in a place that says 'gee would'nt it be nice to have the government pay for everything'. I don't understand communists at all, such as Strange Famous, and there is no way I can even put myself into the mental state where I think 'this makes a little sense.'.

filtherton · 03-12-2004, 08:48 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by irateplatypus
One year of war?
Why didn't anyone tell me?!?!

The last war I heard of was when the US rolled through Iraq with a coalition of forces in a couple weeks last year. You know, the one where we are spending our own tax dollars to get another country back online and prospering. Gosh, I should watch more CNN or something.

Yep, i remember something about a dramatic landing on a us aircraft carrier with a banner reading "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED"
Immediately following this press event bush pulled out all the troops, since, you know, the mission was accomplished. War's over. Iraq then became the bestest democracy since america

.

Mission accomplished indeed. Hopefully iraq won't immediately elect an islamic state with their newfound democracy. But then, it was clear from the outset that the bush admin had figured out the variables and had a solid exit strategy from the get-go. So i'm sure they've got something up their sleeve to prevent iraq from becoming iran 2.

Sparhawk · 03-12-2004, 09:38 PM

Ya know, I never actually saw the banner until I did a search for it:

Has our invasion saved the lives of countless Iraqis? Absolutely, no question in my mind it has.

Did our invasion save American lives? Nope. Quite the opposite.

Strange Famous · 03-13-2004, 12:30 AM

If America had ousted Saddam Hussain in 1991, if it was their intention to oust him, then they would have saved not only the lives of the Iraqi's who have been killed by Ba'arth party loyalists in the last 12 years, but also the estimated 1 to 1.5 million killed by the American sanctions. So let us never allow ourselves to think we did this for the good of the Iraqi people, let us never allow people to claim this was a humaniterian mission - because this is nothing but a disgusting lie.

Saddam Hussain was corrupt and violent and beyond doubt his government was tyranical and did carry out campaigns of murder - but these stories about "1000's of Iraqi's being killed every week by Hussain" are lies, they are simply not true statements. When you ask the people who make them to back them up, you suddenly find that actually they are including the casualties of the Iran - Iraq war as being "murdered by Saddam" - we see that the figures are meaningless. Hussain certainly has been responsible for 1000's of deaths, and his mismanagement and the corruption of his state has lead to a million deaths by starvation and deprivation caused by the American sponsored UN sanctions.

The situation in Iraq now is very dangerous, there are at least 3 factions who want to rule Iraq, and the most likely form it the state will take when it is left alone is a radical, anti semite, anti American islamic state, filled with the orphans of the American terror attack on Iraq... this is not how you make the world safe.

There were no WMD's this is a fact, we know now that no significant stockpiles of these weapons existed, that the Iraqi chemical weapons programm was puny and insignificant.

Ustwo's inability even to understand the meaning of the word "communist" really does go to show how fruitless it can be to debate with some people, they are not willing even to consider another world view to that which the capitalist media force feeds them - "Saddam was a monster, he murdered millions of Iraqi's personally, the Iraqi's all welcome America and love America and are grateful that America has bombed their country for the last 13 years only a tiny minority of Al Qeida terrorists are opposing American colonial war, anyone who wants peace of opposes imperialism is a communist, all communists are Stalinist's who want to send anyone who loves freedom to the gulag"....

This is what the media forces down people's throats, and some people genuinely do believe it.

The fact is that Iraq is at the point of all out war breaking out, the people ay have mostly hated Hussain but they hate the American's just as much, the war was based on a lie and on its stated objectives was a failure. We know that Hussain was America's man in the middle east until the late 80's, that they helped arm him, that they supported him, that they loved him because he was not an Islamic fundamentalist... all this concern for the Iraqi people and what they have suffered under his repressive dictatorship is nausiating hypocrisy. If your concern was the Iraqi people, then America would have supported the Kurdish and Shi-ite lead rebellion in 1991 - rather than making them believe they would support them and then abandoning them and allowing the rebellion to be bloodily put down by the Iraqi armed forces. We know that America then did not care in the slightest about the people of Iraq. We know now that what they care about is Iraqi oil, the first objectives of the war were to capture the oil fields, the laughable excuse being "to prevent the Iraqi's from setting fire to their own oil supplies!!!!"...

The way you defeat someone like Saddam Hussain is by removing the conditions that allow him to exist, by improving the social condition of the people of Iraq, by culture, by trade, by yourself offering an example of democracy - to claim you make people safer by starving and bombing them for a decade, and then invading their country, murdering or imprisoning all of their rulers and installing your own is simply a lie - if we want to talk about mental illness, I would personally ascribe to anyone who still, after all that history teaches us, believes in the good of paternal imperialistic conquest as incapable of reason, unable to understand, without the ability to see basic truth.

The Iraqi people are now being killed by jumpy American soldiers, American bombs and warring factions rather than Saddam Hussain, the Iraqi people are now being robbed and disinherited by American corporations rather than Ba'arthist capitalists - their condition has not improved, we know that the figures that the hard Right and the mass media tout about our not true, the death rate is not dropping it is increasing, more people in Iraq today live with the risk of death than they did under Hussain - the Iraqi people hate America, and Britain, and for every mother some GI shoots by accident, for every family you slaughter with a misguided bomb... you create the suicide bombers of tomorrow, you bring the world closer to danger, the spectacle of the nucler mushroom in London or New York gets nearer and nearer... the policy of America does is not only destroying Iraq, is not only a torture to the Iraqi people, it is a threat to all humanity. Honestly, the UK and the US no longer stand as a part of the community of civilised nations, when you reach a point where you are willing and in fact do use violence against another nation state merely to appropriate the natural resources of that state, you no longer belong in the community of nations.

And all the excuses for the war... the link to Al Qeida and 9/11 - this is a lie, we know that Al Qeida and Hussain hated each other, Bin Laden always thought Hussain was an infidel.

The WMD argument, was a lie, and was known by those with true understanding to always be a lie. Iraq's WMD programms was one of the weakest in the world. if America hate nuclear weapons and biological and chemical poisons designed to be used as weapons as much as they claim, they will find very huge stores of all of these in their own nation...

To free the Iraqi people - a lie again, Hussain was always a butcher, why did no one want to save the Iraqi people in 1989 when the alleged chemical attacks on the Kurds happened (I say alleged not because I dispute that they happened, but because it is not known if Iran or Iraq carried them out)... why did American not even make any formal protest or condemnation against Hussain when this happened? Oh yeah... I forgot, the customer is always right, right?

Lebell · 03-13-2004, 10:56 AM

So you are saying that even though Saddam started a war for no reason with Iran, he is not responsible for the deaths of his soldiers?

Interesting.

Strange Famous · 03-13-2004, 11:10 AM

the war against Iran was popular in Iraq, and the death of the casualties of that war cannot be called "murdered" by Hussain anymore than American soliders killed today in Iraq are killed by George Bush.

03-12-2004, 03:51 PM	#2 (permalink)
Lebell Cracking the Whip Location: Sexymama's arms...	Do you have any comment of your own to add? It would be interesting to hear. __________________ "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." – C. S. Lewis The ONLY sponsors we have are YOU! Please Donate!

03-12-2004, 04:09 PM	#3 (permalink)
Strange Famous follower of the child's crusade?	Well, clearly the world is a more dangerous place than it was a year ago, Iraq has merely been turned from a docile but internally brutally repressive regime to an explosive virtual civil war, the atomic bomb cannot be prevented and WILL spread further throughout the world... I found the idea of America as seeing itself as some kind of Hobbsian Leviathan on an international scale is interesting (and the Leviathan is as much an influance on my political thinking as Das Kapital)... but my gut feeling is that this war was about oil most of all, but I think an element of it was an example to the rest of the world, a punishment beating, to show everyone - "if you disobey American power, you will be beaten, you will be destroyed". of course, as much as we understand that this war was wrong and unjust and has killed thousands of civilians, we must also never keep out of mind that Hussain was a corrupt and blood thirsty butcher who was despised by most ordinary Iraqi's... in fact, the only thing that kept him in power was people felt they had to unite behind him because he could stand up to America (of course, he couldnt...) I dont see any legitimate self defence motive for the war... the people who attacked America came from Saudi Arabia, so attacking Iraq made no sense... Iraq had no real WMD programme, we know this now, but they probably wanted one and would have tried to build one if the UN had left them alone... but there are many other states more dangerous to America who do have WMD's programmes, and the point is they CANT be stopped, the knowledge (and lets face it, these weapons were usually invented by either Russia or America) cannot be erased... To me, the article was interested, and I think when we consider the motives for the attack on Iraq, it does give a very plausible possible explanation (other than the most obvious, which is either oil, or Bush really believed Iraq was about to launch a chemical weapons attack on America, and which one of those you find more believable probably depends more on your world view rather than logic) __________________ "Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate, for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain without being uncovered." The Gospel of Thomas

03-12-2004, 04:11 PM	#4 (permalink)
irateplatypus can't help but laugh Location: dar al-harb	One year of war? Why didn't anyone tell me?!?! The last war I heard of was when the US rolled through Iraq with a coalition of forces in a couple weeks last year. You know, the one where we are spending our own tax dollars to get another country back online and prospering. Gosh, I should watch more CNN or something. "...docile but internally brutally repressive regime to an explosive virtual civil war" strange famous, i'm sorry to call you out again man... there is no malice in it. that just isn't true. __________________ If you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves. ~ Winston Churchill Last edited by irateplatypus; 03-12-2004 at 04:17 PM..

03-12-2004, 04:14 PM	#5 (permalink)
Lebell Cracking the Whip Location: Sexymama's arms...	Thank you __________________ "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." – C. S. Lewis The ONLY sponsors we have are YOU! Please Donate!

03-12-2004, 09:38 PM	#11 (permalink)
Sparhawk Dubya Location: VA	Ya know, I never actually saw the banner until I did a search for it: Has our invasion saved the lives of countless Iraqis? Absolutely, no question in my mind it has. Did our invasion save American lives? Nope. Quite the opposite. __________________ "In Iraq, no doubt about it, it's tough. It's hard work. It's incredibly hard. It's - and it's hard work. I understand how hard it is. I get the casualty reports every day. I see on the TV screens how hard it is. But it's necessary work. We're making progress. It is hard work."

03-12-2004, 05:02 PM	#8 (permalink)
Zeld2.0 Cherry-pickin' devil's advocate Location: Los Angeles	The left is always communist huh. The ones who question a few policies are communists now by your logic? Bullshit anyways, call people whatever you want, but call people who have lost family members against "communists" in other nations - call people who have fought in other people's civil wars against those communists - then thats just plain fucking stupid.

03-13-2004, 12:30 AM	#12 (permalink)
Strange Famous follower of the child's crusade?	If America had ousted Saddam Hussain in 1991, if it was their intention to oust him, then they would have saved not only the lives of the Iraqi's who have been killed by Ba'arth party loyalists in the last 12 years, but also the estimated 1 to 1.5 million killed by the American sanctions. So let us never allow ourselves to think we did this for the good of the Iraqi people, let us never allow people to claim this was a humaniterian mission - because this is nothing but a disgusting lie. Saddam Hussain was corrupt and violent and beyond doubt his government was tyranical and did carry out campaigns of murder - but these stories about "1000's of Iraqi's being killed every week by Hussain" are lies, they are simply not true statements. When you ask the people who make them to back them up, you suddenly find that actually they are including the casualties of the Iran - Iraq war as being "murdered by Saddam" - we see that the figures are meaningless. Hussain certainly has been responsible for 1000's of deaths, and his mismanagement and the corruption of his state has lead to a million deaths by starvation and deprivation caused by the American sponsored UN sanctions. The situation in Iraq now is very dangerous, there are at least 3 factions who want to rule Iraq, and the most likely form it the state will take when it is left alone is a radical, anti semite, anti American islamic state, filled with the orphans of the American terror attack on Iraq... this is not how you make the world safe. There were no WMD's this is a fact, we know now that no significant stockpiles of these weapons existed, that the Iraqi chemical weapons programm was puny and insignificant. Ustwo's inability even to understand the meaning of the word "communist" really does go to show how fruitless it can be to debate with some people, they are not willing even to consider another world view to that which the capitalist media force feeds them - "Saddam was a monster, he murdered millions of Iraqi's personally, the Iraqi's all welcome America and love America and are grateful that America has bombed their country for the last 13 years only a tiny minority of Al Qeida terrorists are opposing American colonial war, anyone who wants peace of opposes imperialism is a communist, all communists are Stalinist's who want to send anyone who loves freedom to the gulag".... This is what the media forces down people's throats, and some people genuinely do believe it. The fact is that Iraq is at the point of all out war breaking out, the people ay have mostly hated Hussain but they hate the American's just as much, the war was based on a lie and on its stated objectives was a failure. We know that Hussain was America's man in the middle east until the late 80's, that they helped arm him, that they supported him, that they loved him because he was not an Islamic fundamentalist... all this concern for the Iraqi people and what they have suffered under his repressive dictatorship is nausiating hypocrisy. If your concern was the Iraqi people, then America would have supported the Kurdish and Shi-ite lead rebellion in 1991 - rather than making them believe they would support them and then abandoning them and allowing the rebellion to be bloodily put down by the Iraqi armed forces. We know that America then did not care in the slightest about the people of Iraq. We know now that what they care about is Iraqi oil, the first objectives of the war were to capture the oil fields, the laughable excuse being "to prevent the Iraqi's from setting fire to their own oil supplies!!!!"... The way you defeat someone like Saddam Hussain is by removing the conditions that allow him to exist, by improving the social condition of the people of Iraq, by culture, by trade, by yourself offering an example of democracy - to claim you make people safer by starving and bombing them for a decade, and then invading their country, murdering or imprisoning all of their rulers and installing your own is simply a lie - if we want to talk about mental illness, I would personally ascribe to anyone who still, after all that history teaches us, believes in the good of paternal imperialistic conquest as incapable of reason, unable to understand, without the ability to see basic truth. The Iraqi people are now being killed by jumpy American soldiers, American bombs and warring factions rather than Saddam Hussain, the Iraqi people are now being robbed and disinherited by American corporations rather than Ba'arthist capitalists - their condition has not improved, we know that the figures that the hard Right and the mass media tout about our not true, the death rate is not dropping it is increasing, more people in Iraq today live with the risk of death than they did under Hussain - the Iraqi people hate America, and Britain, and for every mother some GI shoots by accident, for every family you slaughter with a misguided bomb... you create the suicide bombers of tomorrow, you bring the world closer to danger, the spectacle of the nucler mushroom in London or New York gets nearer and nearer... the policy of America does is not only destroying Iraq, is not only a torture to the Iraqi people, it is a threat to all humanity. Honestly, the UK and the US no longer stand as a part of the community of civilised nations, when you reach a point where you are willing and in fact do use violence against another nation state merely to appropriate the natural resources of that state, you no longer belong in the community of nations. And all the excuses for the war... the link to Al Qeida and 9/11 - this is a lie, we know that Al Qeida and Hussain hated each other, Bin Laden always thought Hussain was an infidel. The WMD argument, was a lie, and was known by those with true understanding to always be a lie. Iraq's WMD programms was one of the weakest in the world. if America hate nuclear weapons and biological and chemical poisons designed to be used as weapons as much as they claim, they will find very huge stores of all of these in their own nation... To free the Iraqi people - a lie again, Hussain was always a butcher, why did no one want to save the Iraqi people in 1989 when the alleged chemical attacks on the Kurds happened (I say alleged not because I dispute that they happened, but because it is not known if Iran or Iraq carried them out)... why did American not even make any formal protest or condemnation against Hussain when this happened? Oh yeah... I forgot, the customer is always right, right? __________________ "Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate, for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain without being uncovered." The Gospel of Thomas

03-13-2004, 10:56 AM	#13 (permalink)
Lebell Cracking the Whip Location: Sexymama's arms...	So you are saying that even though Saddam started a war for no reason with Iran, he is not responsible for the deaths of his soldiers? Interesting. __________________ "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." – C. S. Lewis The ONLY sponsors we have are YOU! Please Donate!

03-13-2004, 11:10 AM	#14 (permalink)
Strange Famous follower of the child's crusade?	the war against Iran was popular in Iraq, and the death of the casualties of that war cannot be called "murdered" by Hussain anymore than American soliders killed today in Iraq are killed by George Bush. __________________ "Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate, for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain without being uncovered." The Gospel of Thomas