The US, The UN and Iraq

No. Well, possibly. They'll hire Adrian Brody to play Osama, a fact which will only come out in 2031. Actually, Adrian Brody has always played Osama. There is no Osama. There is Cheney. There is Rove. There is Junior. There is great political greed, psychosis, and -- in the American public -- a credulity so great and inexplicable that it will be given a new name by the next generation of psychotherapists and will be listed officially as an illness by United Healthcare, co-pay 25% (payable only in Euros).

All that, Kara, and more!

The thread was actually started by Walter and the question was something like "Why are there no war protests?" After two whole responses, it was totally off topic, and Walter objected to the direction. Jespah split the thread, and combined it into one started by Craven, as I recall, titled "The US, The UN and Iraq". Now, there is some sort of universal law that when a thread is split, it uses the last, or maybe first, respondent as the creator. Edgarblythe was that lucky devil.

So there you have the inside, down and dirty, inside scoop.

Jackie Ashley comments in today's Guardian that it is a danger for democracy, if we look at our ruling elite and don't recognise ourselves in them.

We have moved on, but our politicians are stuck on war

This seems to be as true, IMHO, as there was New Years Day yesterday in the Islamic world.

I'm not a Canadian, but I couldn't resist posting this.


Apologies to the USA

On behalf of Canadians everywhere I'd like to offer an apology to the United States of America. We haven't been getting along very well recently and for that, I am truly sorry.

I'm sorry we called George Bush a moron. He is a moron but, it wasn't nice of us to point it out. If it's any consolation, the fact that he's a moron shouldn't reflect poorly on the people of America. After all it's not like you actually elected him.

I'm sorry about our softwood lumber. Just because we have more trees than you, doesn't give us the right to sell you lumber that's cheaper and better than your own.

I'm sorry we beat you in Olympic hockey. In our defence I guess our excuse would be that our team was much, much, much, much better than yours.

I'm sorry we burnt down your white house during the War of 1812. I notice you've rebuilt it! It's very nice.

I'm sorry about your beer. I know we had nothing to do with your beer but, we feel your pain.

I'm sorry about our waffling on Iraq. I mean, when you're going up against a crazed dictator, you wanna have your friends by your side. I realize it took more than two years before you guys pitched in against Hitler, but that was different. Everyone knew he had weapons.

And finally on behalf of all Canadians, I'm sorry that we're constantly apologizing for things in a passive-aggressive way which is really a thinly veiled criticism. I sincerely hope that you're not upset over this. We've seen what you do to countries you get upset with

what?? you can't wear t-shirts that say "bush is a terrorist?"....thats horrible...I thought you had rights down there. I mean especially when the shirt was right. I didn't know Clinton was a rapist?? I thought he was a terrorist too but not a rapist....and I think that schools should be promoting political thought and expression....I know I promote it in my school all the way!!! It's my responsibility....

Welcome, Marc -
... - and thanks for the "Canadian apologies", Wilso!

LOL. love the smiley

Lets see if it works.

Wilso

I really wish you hadn't reminded George II that it was George III (with some help) who burned down the Whitehouse. There is some very delicate diplomacy going on right now, and we don't want to make it more difficult for George Bush jnr to concentrate.

Every time I hear the rhetoric 'Saddam killed his own people' I think of the American indians and how they suffered under 'manifest destiny' ... how they were given smallpox contaminated blankets from which thousands died. I think of the black soldiers that were intentionally infected with syphilis in a medical study .... I think of Kent State University where unarmed students were killed by the National Guard .... the people in Afghanistan, innocent people that to the instant of their death, never heard of the towers, had no idea of what they were.

And I wonder, after Iraq, who is next .... who will pay for the satisfaction of war?

And why is the bill always picked up by the least agressive, the poor souls that walk through life with no greater desire but to die of something other than starvation.

As demonstrated in Texas Mr. Bush has no idea of the quality of mercy or the value of human life. What will the upcoming death of the innocents in Iraq provide the American people?

Hi Ge. Excellent post.

Tantor said:


Your first point. It is in defiance of logic that one can propose a different ending to what happened. No one has any idea what Saddam would have done with nuclear capacity. Maybe he wanted to defend himself, just as we do with out supply of nukes. What's that you say? We are "good" and he is "evil?"

Your second point. I heard a speech on NPR last night by Winston Churchill, given in 1946, wherein he says that WW II did not have to happen. The entire conflict could have been solved without anyone firing a shot. I deny your major premise: Starting a war with the Nazis would certainly have furthered world peace.

Has The Date been set?

http://www.albawaba.com/news/index.php3?sid=243523&lang=e&dir=news


While a leak of this nature may be improbable, I none the less fully expect The War to be well under way by St. Patrick's Day. Buttressing the Albawaba report is this from Stratfor:






timber

Strangeloves in Bloom
By James P. PINKERTON

It's a sign of the hawkish times that supporters of war against Iraq are able to get away with labeling antiwar doves as wimps and fools. Indeed, some prowarriors go further, smearing antiwar Americans as dupes of the enemy.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) pronounces some antiwar Democrats guilty of "appeasement" toward Saddam Hussein; the neoconservative Weekly Standard makes the same accusation against the entire State Department as well as selected Republicans. Columnist Mona Charen has gone even further; in a new book titled "Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First,' she attacks, among others, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and Madeleine Albright. Charen's title comes from Soviet leader VT Lenin's phrase referring to those who unwittingly helped the communist cause. And last week, Council on Foreign Relations fellow Max Boot blasted all antiwar opinion - not only over the last year but also over the last century - saying protests slowed or thwarted U.S. victories from the SpanishAmerican War to Vietnam

Got that?

On its face, this argument may seem absurd, but its true absurdity is found in the criticism of peace movements. Opposition to the U.S. occupation of the former Spanish colony of the Philippines allegedly gave false hope to Washington's enemies, encouraging

them to keep fighting. But was it really a good idea for the American military to subdue the Philippines? It took 70,000 U.S. soldiers to crush the insurrectos, a four-year operation that cost 4,234 American lives and caused the deaths of 200,000 Filipinos. One might ask, what was the upside for the U.S.?

And who were the protesters against this American imperialism? They included Mark Twain, philosopher William James, industrialist Andrew Carnegie and union leader Samuel Gompers. Did these people have American blood on their hands? Were they "useful idiots" aiding the Filipinos? Or were they simply preferring peace to war?

The intellectual mission of the Iraq hawks today is to erase bad memories of past conflicts so as to wipe the slate clean for future conflicts. "Liberal views, forged in Vietnam and tempered in Central America and beyond, got the world wrong," Charen laments. War opponents, she alleges, were politically and ideologically misguided, although it is likely that most simply wanted to prevent more Americans from being killed in a futile quagmire. Fortunately for the pro-warriors, after 30 years the memories of the Vietnam debacle and its terrible toll have grown dim.

Yet even as the U.S. was losing the hot war in Vietnam, it was winning the Cold War against the Soviet Union. And that's a victory the hawks don't like to talk about anymore. Why not? Because the favored strategy of the ultrahawks - the forcible "rollback" of the Soviet Union was not adopted. Instead, presidents from Truman to the first Bush followed a tough-minded strategy of armed containment. Acting in conjunction with allies, in accordance with international law, the U.S. waited out the Soviet Union until it collapsed of its own dead weight.

Today, the Iraq hawks, in their increasingly Strangelovian fashion, don't want to repeat the Cold War patience. They don't want to let the inspections process chip away at Hussein's arsenal; they don't want the dictator to be lured into exile. They want a hot war, and they want it now. To get it, they are eager to trash the mechanisms of dispute resolution that have been built up over the decades: the United Nations, the North Atlantic. Treaty Organization and, more recently, the International Criminal Court.

Polls show that most Americans want to work cooperatively through international institutions to disarm Iraq. In other words, they don't want a rush to war.

But that's exactly what the hawks do want. And so they must squawk loudly, to drown out not only the idea of democratic protest but also the very idea of peace.

James P. Pinkerton, a White House staffer in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, is a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington.

Here's something for you antiwar folks to snicker about over your coffee this morning


"Charlie Daniels' Open Letter to the Hollywood Bunch"


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



OK -- Let's just say for a moment you bunch of
pampered, overpaid, unrealistic children
had your way and the U.S.A. didn't go into Iraq.


Let's say that you really get your way
and we destroy all our nuclear weapons
and stick daisies in our gun barrels
and sit around with some white wine and cheese
and pat ourselves on the back,
so proud of what we've done for world peace.


Let's say that we cut the military budget to
just enough to keep the National Guard
on hand to help out with floods and fires.


Let's say that we close down
our military bases all over the world
and bring the troops home,
increase our foreign aid
and drop all the trade sanctions
against everybody.


I suppose that in your fantasy world
this would create a utopian world
where everybody would live in peace.
After all, the great monster,
the United States of America,
the cause of all the world's trouble
would have disbanded it's horrible military
and certainly all the other countries
of the world would follow suit.


After all, they only arm themselves
to defend their countries from the evil USA.


Why you bunch of pitiful, hypocritical,
idiotic, spoiled mugwumps.
Get your head out of the sand
and smell the Trade Towers burning.


Do you think that a trip to Iraq by Sean Penn
did anything but encourage a wanton murderer
to think that the people of the U.S.A.
didn't have the nerve or the guts to fight him?


Barbra Streisand's fanatical and hateful rantings
about George Bush makes about as much sense
as Michael Jackson hanging a baby over a railing.


You people need to get out of Hollywood
once in a while and get out into the real world.
You'd be surprised by what America really thinks of you.


Stop in at a truck stop and tell an overworked,
long distance truck driver that you don't think
Saddam Hussein is doing anything wrong.


Tell a farmer with a couple of sons in the military
that you think the United States
has no right to defend itself.


Go down to Baxley, Georgia and hold an anti-war rally
and see what the folks down there think about you.


You people are some of the most disgusting examples
of a waste of protoplasm I've ever
had the displeasure to hear about.


Sean Penn, you're a traitor to the United States of America.
You gave aid and comfort to the enemy.
How many American lives will your little,
"fact finding trip" to Iraq cost?
You encouraged Saddam to think
that we didn't have the stomach for war.


You people protect one of the most evil men
on the face of this earth and won't lift a finger
to save the life of an unborn baby.
Freedom of choice you say?


Well I'm going to exercise
some freedom of choice of my own.


If I see any of your names on a marquee,
I'm going to boycott the movie.
I will completely stop going to movies if I have to.
In most cases it certainly wouldn't be much of a loss.


You scoff at our military whose boots
you're not even worthy to shine.


They go to battle and risk their lives
so ingrates like you can live in luxury.


The day of reckoning is coming
when you will be faced with the undeniable truth
that the war against Saddam Hussein
is the war on terrorism.


America is in imminent danger.


You're either for her or against her.
There is no middle ground.


I think we all know where you stand.


What do you think?


God Bless America!




Charlie Daniels
Copyright © 2003 Charlie Daniels


"Well said Charlie, thank you."
Talltexian


And...yes, I sent the President his copy. TT

It should be borne in mind that it is the soldier and his rifle, not the protestor and his placard, that ensures the right of the protestor to carry his placard. It always has been and will be thus.


An aside: It is being announced that Bush The Younger will conduct a press conference this evening at 8 PM EST. While I doubt there will be any earth-shaking revelation or declaration, there is certain to be considerable material of interest, and plenty of lines to be read between. It looks more and more like The Starter's Gun will sound somewhere around mid-to-late next week.



timber.

perception, posting that hysterical rant is not in keeping with the usually reasonable comments you have made on this thread.

timber, it is our country's democratic form of government and our Constitution that guarantees us the right to protest.

Timber - your news greatly appreciated as always.

Reverting to your earlier observation about post-war Iraq: Yugoslavia was entirely populated by choirboys compared to the Mesopotamian tribes - Sunni, Shia, Kurdish, Turkmen, and on and on; at least participants in the Bosnia conflict were all Slavs, and in the Kosovo conflict at least Indoeuropeans. Keeping order in the landscape starting on "the day after" will require hundreds of thousands of troops, as General Shinseki rightly estimated, bringing war-related expenditures to several hundred billion dollars.

The hope expressed by the Perle, Wolfowitz and Co. gang that the resulting realignment of forces - or even of borders - in the region will work to the advantage of their correligionists is contingent on a number of very-low-probability assumptions.

Tracing branches of maximum-probability tree of tactical development over the war's anticipated timeline gives a picture of a "post-liberation Iraq" at best left in the current condition of Afghanistan - unchanged borders, the rule of regional warlords remaining unchallenged. This is the best case scenario.

The only positive datum is that Iraq's massive oil deposits (on average deeper than Kuwait's, where they're so close to the surface drilling is hardly required) are almost impossible to destroy even with nuclear or chemical weapons, so at least some wealth will be available locally to pay for Iraq's reconstruction. A post-war administration might even reimburse us for 80% of actual war costs, as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia did in Gulf War I; but there can be no parallel to General MacArthur's administration of Japan, because then the Emperor was allowed to remain, and that country was unquestionably unified and united.

Kara - the constitution is just a piece of paper unless backed by the force of arms; otherwise the Civil War was fought for naught.

Finally, to Walter and Steve: President Bush is not envisioning a "crusade". Such might yet come to develop, however, if Saddam manages - with whatever bio-chem weapons he still has - to inflict massive casualties on Israeli civilians, he will unquestionably become a hero to a billion-plus Moslems, most of whom now detest him as a repulsive torturer, with unforeseeable political and economic consequences.

This is the major gamble we're taking. Eerily described in detail by the late, very great, General George Marshall (a Republican serving as Secretary of Defense in the Democrat Truman administration) in his opposition to locating a Jewish state in that region. You may all wish to look up Gen. Marshall's prediction on "the day after" the U.S. were dragged into a war to ultimately protect a state of Israel <G>

Kara
With all due respect----you miss the point entirely. What is it exactly that ensures the survival of our democracy and our way of life. OUR WAY OF LIFE-----AS MISERABLE AND IMMORAL AS MANY OF THE POSTERS ON THIS THREAD SEEM TO THINK.

I took the trouble to look at the Charlie Daniels web site. It features an old man with a taliban beard and strange head garb holding what appears to be some sort of primitive weapon. Clearly a dangerous lunatic, and not to be taken seriously.