The US, The UN and Iraq

timber, Once war begins, anything is liable to happen. When we have peace, no matter how fragile, it's still peace. People are not getting killed. Don't forget, many countries without nuclear weapons fear all those that have nuclear weapons. They are defenseless. Fear alone does not give them the right to kill innocent people whose governments have nuclear weapons. Saddam has stayed away from using WMD during the Gulf War. What makes you think he will use it in the future? The only scenario I see him using WMD is when the US attacks Iraq as an aggressor. As I said before, he is now contained. We have the no-fly zones, we have U2 planes and pilotless drones taking intelligence photos. He is contained. Let's keep it that way for many years to come. Maybe peace will come by default with no killings necessary. Starting military action should be the very last option, not the first. c.i.

Just caught the tail end of and interview with David Gergen on Charlie Rose. Gergen said that (paraphasing from memory) Bush will become known either as a bold, courageous and far-sighted president or as a president who stubbornly pushed America into a drive for empire which we will all come to regret. And that it is not yet clear which of these will be so.

Blatham - It sounds like Gergen has taken the bold position that tomorrow's history has not yet been written.

Gergen likes to have it both ways; that way he won't be told he was wrong! c.i.

Here's a link for you naysayers that believe Saddam is a threat to our security.

http://www.harpers.org/online/the_road_to_babylon/?pg=1

c.i.

Well, c.i., I just don't see that as anything more than an opinion piece, and much of it is based on at best questionable assumptions..
Let me offer a different take, from a less agenda-driven source, which explores the motives behind France's opposition:
(This is from a Subscription Service ... so I'll cut-and-paste)
http://www.stratfor.biz/Story.neo?storyId=209472


Now the above I consider objective, fact-based analysis. The Harper's piece you quoted struck more as topical partisan commentary. I tend to read more of the sort of stuff I just quoted than of the sort of stuff you linked to. I prefer, in matters of grave concern, to deal with information, not entertainment.

I subscribe to several "Hard News" and "Dedicated Financial" sources, and apart from their daily on-line issues, I recieve an ongoing flood of e-mail alerts of breaking events and continuing updates ... often receiving an e-mail within minutes of, often even prior to, the first TV News Network urgent announcement of a particular "This Just In" item. Lots of it is of interest only to a very narrow spectrum ... active traders on the world securities and currencies markets. Most of it is pretty dull reading unless your desire is the assimilation of facts uncolored by opinion. Who bought what, who met with who, who has shifted what assets, financial or physical, to where, what legislation in which nation will affect what firm or industry, what major manufacturer got what contract for whatever from which government ... lots of charts and numbers and lists and that sort of thing. Personally, I enjoy hell out of reading it. Among other things, over the past few years, information I've gleaned thereby has very comfortably shielded me from the general downturn of The World Market. I find it profitable to remain informed.
The short version of my interest in Politics and Global Issues is that I'm in it for the money. My money is on Bush.



timber

LOL tres

ci

You are right. Saddam is contained.
How can he threaten anyone with inspectors crawling all over the country and huge military forces poised to strike at him if he so much as farts?

War should be the very last resort. Not an instrument of policy. Are we really saying to Saddam

"we are going to kill you your family and thousands of others because although you have been co operating with us, you have not been co operating as much as we would like?"

Its a nonsense and brings disgrace on US/UK. Worst of all it dishonours the name of the brave men and women who we send to do the slaughtering for us. Britain and America are (in theory) democracies. It is us, not our armed forces, who have the blood of the innocent on our hands.

Waging aggressive war was what the nazis did. Nuremberg established it was a crime. As far as I know it is still a crime. It makes your president and our prime minister guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. It makes them and us no better than Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot or indicted war criminal Sharon.

My only hope is that Russia China or France will stand up to American bullying and veto any further UN resolution authorising war. At least then the perpetrators of this illegal immoral and unnecessary action will be exposed as the murderers they are. Of course its a vain hope. There will be no second resolution if America can't fix the vote beforehand.

Timber

Once again logic and facts meet blind denial.

perception

if your comments were directed at me, please be good enough to say so thanks

I'm not denying any facts. I'm asking for facts justifying the case for war. If you have any please post them here for the elucidation of us all.

Steve

My comments were directed at anyone who ignored the facts and logic presented by Timbers post and just digs a deeper trench to maintain their position. Timber, Georgeob1, and Asherman have consistently presented logical point by point arguments supported by factual authoritative evidence only to have the opposition come back with biased opinionated mythical argument supported by the same. This is how I as an observer interpret the goings on. I would love to see any who possess the opposite point of view present something that could be considered evidence (in any actual debate) because it would be much more interesting from an observers point of view.

Your logic is my heresy. Who is right, who is wrong? Only history will tell - except, you decide to fly in the face of truth! You turn true fiction into fact!

Yeah, percy, but which is yours and which is mine?

Bet we disagree about that, too...

At the rally in D.C. on January 18 (I watched on C-Span), I saw a lot of signs with messages like, "America Is The Real Terrorist." I hate to see that, because I know what that's going to look like to most Americans, who may not be sure about this war but are also not ready to understand why anyone in their right mind would say or indeed believe that the United States government is a bunch of terrorists. But what I hate even more is watching this administration prove that, as a matter of fact, they are.

The administration has revealed its war plan, and it has a name: "Shock And Awe." The plan is to pummel Baghdad with hundreds of cruise missiles in the first two days, thus leaving the population too demoralized (and too dead) to fight back when our troops arrive to occupy the country.

Quote:

"The battle plan is based on a concept developed at the National Defense University. It's called 'Shock and Awe' and it focuses on the psychological destruction of the enemy's will to fight rather than the physical destruction of his military forces."

In the article, one Harlan Ullman points out that the great virtue of the "Shock and Awe" strategy is that instead of a long, drawn-out ground battle, you achieve a "simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima." (Note that he says 'like Hiroshima' like that's a good thing.)

People who know more about this than I say it's not necessarily certain that "Shock And Awe" will be any worse for the people of Baghdad than the relentless carpet-bombing that preceded our invasion of Kuwait in 1991 (sorry, that's "liberation of Kuwait;" semper hic erro). It will certainly be more expensive, as cruise missiles cost over a million dollars apiece, but that won't matter much to the Iraqi civilians.

So why does reading this particular piece of "journalism" turn my stomach -- a stomach which, I promise you, has been turned so many times lately it's nothing but knots at this point -- so much more than even reading a White House press conference transcript? Well, I think the answer is pretty simple. They can call it "Shock And Awe" if they want; but by the Pentagon's own admission, we've already got a name for this kind of thing, and it is "terrorism."

If you subtract the purely ideological elements of the definition, what is terrorism but the attempt to instill massive fear and horror amongst a nation's people by killing a number of their civilians in a particularly sudden, violent, and spectacular manner? Terrorism relies on "Shock and Awe" for its impact; "shock and awe" was what the WTC and Pentagon attacks were all about. And by God, we were shocked and awed.

And now we're looking to do unto others what was done unto us. And we don't particularly care whether the people we're doing it unto were actually responsible for 9/11 or not. That's another hallmark of terrorist actions: terrorists don't strike the people who are actually responsible for the grievances they cite. They go after the people they can get to. Our inability to locate Osama Bin Laden has long become the subject of jokes all over the globe; but we know where Baghdad is.

So, it's official: we're terrorists. We even admit that. "There will not be a safe place in Baghdad," chortles an unnamed Pentagon official...unnamed, perhaps, because he realized how much this statement sounds like one of those tape-recorded boasts from Osama Bin Laden that kept surfacing during "Operation Enduring Freedom."

I can't figure out which horrifies me most: the fact that this terrorist action has become the core of our battle plan, or the fact that the Pentagon thinks it's a good idea to let us know that. Memo to Rumsfeld: just because you bastards are terrorists, that doesn't mean the rest of us are.

Or are we? How many Americans are going to read that piece and think, "Whoa, shock and awe! That's so cool!" I know there must be a few. And to them, I can only repeat a question that has been much in my mind of late: What the hell is the matter with you people?

It doesn't bother anyone in the Pentagon that our battle plan is organized around the deliberate taking of civilian life? It doesn't bother anyone that by publicizing this plan in advance, we have ensured that Saddam Hussein and his cronies will not actually be in Baghdad when we send the cruise missiles in there to shock and awe it to death? It doesn't bother anyone to imagine what it will be like for the people huddled in their basements (which, as we now know, will not be safe) while 800 cruise missiles detonate in their city...or to wonder whether that's going to be more or less terrifying than being on the 34th floor of the South Tower when the plane hit? It doesn't bother anyone to know that the worst thing anyone could possibly say about our government is now, in fact, by its own admission, true?

All right, maybe it doesn't bother Rumsfeld; I know it doesn't bother Dubya, who is really not capable of being bothered by anything that happens to people other than himself, as that would require intelligence and imagination. It bothers me. I bet it bothers you. It ought to bother every citizen of this country.

The best we can hope for is that in fact, this is all just a plant organized by that Office of Strategic Information (that Dubya's administration says they decided not to set up after all) and in fact our battle plan is something completely different. And that's what we're reduced to, folks: hoping that our government is lying to us, because it's just too damn horrifying if they're actually telling the truth.

BillW

Was your post addressed to anyone or are you talking to the wind.

diddy

In case you want something "THAT WILL REALLY HORRIFY YOU AND TURN YOUR STOMACH"
visit Saddams torture chambers. Since you have your head buried in the sand it will be somewhat difficult for you to read the following link by AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL who unlike the ACLU do a decent job of being impartial.
http://web.amnesty.org/ai.nsf/index/MDE140082001?OpenDocument&of=COUNTIES\IRAQ

Pdiddie

Great post. I understand your outrage that this is being done in the name of that great country of yours (and mine). What shocks and awes me is the power the Administration has to control not just the actions of citizens, but to manipulate and direct the very thought processes that gives rise to them.

I half remember this quote... don't know who said it, or when or even if its correct but it goes something like

"He who controls the present, determines the past. And he who controls the past, determines the future".

I think even this is not subtle enough for what goes on today. George Orwell would have been gobsmacked.

perception" glad you liked the Amnesty International statement and i assume you agree with this Amnesty International statement:
"The human rights situation in Iraq is being invoked with unusual frequency by some western political leaders to justify military action. This selective attention to human rights is nothing but a cold and calculated manipulation of the work of human rights activists. Let us not forget that these same governments turned a blind eye to Amnesty International's reports of widespread human rights violations in Iraq before the Gulf War. They remained silent when thousands unarmed Kurdish civilians were killed in Halabja in 1988."

diddy

Regarding the stated Pentagon strategy of "Shock and Awe"----it sounds as though our professional soldiers are using all the awesome capabilities that the age of technology has provided to ensure the LEAST loss of life(unlike the civil war where they lined up in a very Macho manner---and stupid) and killed each other in staggering amounts. 600,000 of our best men. Now I will attempt to use some logic here----If you were about to enter the hospital for serious surgery, I believe you would probably prefer to have the most qualified surgeon available using the most advanced equipment to ensure that you survived the procedure. Since the warrior also wants to survive the procedure it would seem logical to me that he would want to use tactics that would most likely ensure his survival. The professional warrior of today is no longer guilty of sleepwalking to his death as in the civil war--he has analysed past wars. He has studied and learned from past failures so that now by combining our vast technological superiority and the intellectual talents of truly well educated warriors we can see that destroying an enemies will to fight is the quickest and most humane way to wage war----on both sides of the battle. We want to confuse the mind of the enemy so that he cannot react.

Do you see any logic in my statement diddy? Does it make any difference to you that we want to preserve all the infrastructure in Iraq for use after the war. If we preserve that infrastructure how can we kill any of the people? Now if there are civilians around the military targets they may not fare very well-----they have been warned however by our psywar campaign.

Why do I get the feeling that you will not even consider what I have just said?