The UN, US and Iraq IV

Steve (as 41oo) wrote:

nimh

My esteem for you grows ever higher. Not only did your lot do for McBerties boys last night

hehhehheh

Steve (as 41oo) wrote:

but you now tell me you speak Russian.

I tried to learn that language....with mixed results. The only adverts I could read at the Wales/Russia game were for vodka (and Rus-telekom...quite proud of that!).

wweeeellll ... i didnt say i still speak Russian ;-). If only.

I learned Russian for a few years, as part of my studies. But it is a devilishly hard language to learn. In the end, a one-month course in St Petersburg taught me more than two years of courses here in Holland - and after that I could keep up quite a decent conversation. Not good, but fair enough. I could even attend a lecture and understand all of it - though I remember I went to a follow-up lecture and understood none.

I read articles from current Moskovskie Novosti and Argumenty i Fakty issues - and yes, old Pravda ones too - for homework and out of interest (elections and so on) - but I had to use a fat dictionary and it took me a long time. Hence why I still remember so well ;-). Yeh, and then I finished my obligatory courses back home, turned my interest to Hungarian (which I like better and suited my interests more), with about equal results in the end, and then another six, seven years passed when I didnt look much at either, and now I wouldnt be able to have the simplest of conversations in either language anymore, and wouldnt dare try to read more than the BODKA advertisement either ...

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Quote:

What Bush + Blair have themselves to blame for is de facto aiding Al-Qaeda by making, with their actions in Iraq and elsewhere, many people who would otherwise have been neutral sympathetic to Osama, and masses of people who would otherwise have been in solidarity against Al-Qadea retreat to the sides in exasperation at their bluster and blunders.

nimh, you wrote this in response to gautam's indictment of B & B. I think this is what he meant in his indictment.

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When I mention that my brother-in-law wrote a doctorate thesis about 'The Stefan Zweig reception in the USSR" with literally hundreds of Russian sources - that doesn't give me any credit, does it? :wink:

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No Walter it doesn't says Ros wearing Christmas antlers in anticipation

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Quote:

A Silver-Lining View of George Bush's Not Attending Military Funerals, Lest He Become Associated With Bad News

Thanks, Tartarin. But it is a sad, pitiful poem. It may be your last word but it will not be mine. Timber posits that this all may be "unsophisticated argument." When a soldier dies for his country, the whole country loses a part of its self, its symbolic self. The person who started that war, and sent those soldiers to fight and die, should acknowledge each death personally.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee. Each one of those dead died for all of us.

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Steve (as 41oo) wrote:

No Walter it doesn't says Ros

Steve (as 41oo) wrote:

wearing Christmas antlers in anticipation

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Kara wrote:

nimh, you wrote this in response to gautam's indictment of B & B. I think this is what he meant in his indictment.

I dont know what he meant, but I do know it's important to keep the two things separately. The Al-Qaeda brand of fundamentalist, extremist terrorism predates both Bush and Blair. It exists of itself, by itself and has goals of its own unrelated to how Bush or Blair choose to pursue international diplomacy. A Clinton or Kennedy (thats the LibDem leader, folks) would have to face their very same threat.

Its important to point out where Bush is making things worse - I do so all the time. To point out how terrorism can escalate its success if it can enjoy ambivalent or even sympathetic surroundings, of people alienated by the with-us-or-against-us US counteroffensive. But you cant blame the extremism in itself on Bush or Blair. At most you can trace back the success of Islamist extremism to legacies of offensive Western foreign policy in the past, but if you do so you would also have to acknowledge there were enough domestic roots of those movements as well - and in any case it would already have little to do with B + B anymore.

Reason I oppose Bush's policies so is not because I think the problem of Islamist terrorism wouldnt be there if he would just get out of the way - it's there, and attacks like Istanbul's are bound to repeat themselves again and again as long as its there - reason I oppose Bush's policies is because I think they're escalating the danger.

To blame the Istanbul attack on Bush + Blair is to close one's eyes to a real enough danger.

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I used to think pre 911 that I had a reasonable understanding of what's going on. Now I really don't know. Is it War on Terror, if so why do they terrorise us? Or is it American imperialism and the reaction to it? Despite B&B's bluster, we can't win against people prepared to detonate themselves. Why are they prepared to do this? What have we done to upset them so much? How long until they get nuclear bombs? And what do we do then?

How do you stop an ex Russian nuclear landmine (sold for a pittance) going from Kazakhstan to Denmark to Iceland to Greenland to Canada to the willing Muslim martyr in Baltimore?

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blatham wrote:

sofia

You're not a fool, you shouldn't wear the clothing of one.

The claims were two...that Bush has kept himself away from any close connection with American military funerals, and...that such behavior is entirely consonant with the PR (not substantive) concentration of this administration.

The first is accurate (if not, please show the case) [..]

Oh, come off it Blatham - I did (albeit hesitantly). You clearly wrote, in this thread:

Blatham wrote:

sofia - Please find me a single example of bush going to a funeral or visiting a family.

And then you wrote,

Blatham wrote:

This behavior by Bush is entirely consistent with everything we know about this whitehouse. [..] What would you say timber, if you were president, and your staff said "Don't go to any funerals or visit any families, because folks are going to be reminded that kids are dying"?

You couldnt have made your case more clearly. Going on that article I couldnt find back, I had the same impression, and posted it here, too.

Then Sofia came up with proof that Bush did "visit families", at least back in April, when he still had overwhelming approval rates. Then, after I commented on the date of that proof, Fishin' came up with an example of where Bush had done the same thing, just recently.

We were wrong on the specifics. Bush does not, apparently, shirk away from facing the relatives of "people who did serve and who did sacrifice". Why not just admit being wrong on that one count, at least. There is little more exasperating on a board like this than people stubbornly refusing to admit any single thing they were wrong on, even if you put the evidence, links stats and all, right into their face. Just because Sofia has been among those people doesnt mean you have to be, too. Bad figure, like she says.

Are you afraid it will undermine your whole argument? It needn't. I think the posts of Fishin', Tartarin et al., the other day, plainly showed we were all a bit right.

He does visit at least some the families - not such a heartless slob that he'd even refuse that just to avoid embarassment, thus. Credit to him. There also is the issue of dead soldiers being buried without a single representative of the government that sent them into war attending to take up the command's responsibility (as the Rocky Mountain News article Hobit posted showed). And then there's Tartarin's posting of that Washington Post article, "Bush bans coverage of U.S. corpses arriving from Iraq", which showed that the Bush administration did suddenly, after the Afghanistan war, start to implement a protocol that prescribes that "there will be no arrival ceremonies for, or media coverage of, deceased military personnel returning to or departing from Ramstein [..] or Dover [..], to include interim stops".

The same article shows that this suspension of public tribute is in marked contrast to the "memorable ceremonies" that were held to pay respect for the troops who were killed when Reagan, Carter and Clinton were president. (Ceremonies that were held, too, when Bush Sr. was president, by the way, Sofia - so much for the argument of "Bush I and II's belief about the sanctity of family privacy".) The article noted that:

Quote:

President Jimmy Carter attended ceremonies for troops killed in Pakistan, Egypt and the failed hostage rescue mission in Iran. President Ronald Reagan participated in many memorable ceremonies, including a service at Camp Lejeune in 1983 for 241 Marines killed in Beirut. Among several events at military bases, he went to Andrews in 1985 to pin Purple Hearts to the caskets of marines killed in San Salvador, and, at Mayport Naval Station in Florida in 1987, he eulogized those killed aboard the USS Stark in the Persian Gulf. During President George H.W. Bush's term, there were ceremonies at Dover and Andrews for Americans killed in Panama, Lebanon and aboard the USS Iowa.

The fact that Bush Jr. is the first to break with this tradition by implementing a protocol that may have been devised in Clinton's last months but wasn't apparently actually acted on before - and did so out of, it would seem, PR motives - still says something. 'S been enough additional evidence posted on this thread, too.

You can still make your case, without childishly refusing to just give credit where it's due when someone actually took the effort to dig through the archives to prove at least one of your points wrong. Cause that's very frustrating. The articles Sofia and Fishin' provided did change my perception, at least, of what Bush does or doesn't do.

<climbs off pulpit>

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Brand X wrote:

November 18, 2003, 11:02 a.m.
The London Streets
Who are these anti-Bush people?

The 60 or so leftist and Islamist groups involved in this odd enterprise have never managed to win more than one half of one percent of the votes in any British general election. Nor have they succeeded in winning a single seat in parliament or a majority in a single municipal council.

Well, that's incorrect for starters.

The Communist Party has had two seats in British parliament. Willie Gallacher held the seat for the Scottish West Fife constituency from 1935 to 1950. Some of the mining communities there were known as "Little Moscows". In fact, the Glasgow Caledonian University still houses "The Gallacher Memorial Library". In the 1945 general election, the 21 Communist candidates won over 100,000 votes, and apart from Gallacher, Phil Piratin was elected MP for the London Eastend constituency of Mile End. Harry Pollitt was narrowly defeated by Labour in that other "Little Moscow", the Welsh mining town of Rhondda East, by 16,733 to 15,761 votes.

Even as late as 1990, however, a Communist was elected to represent the Ballingry/Lochore electoral division in the Fife regional council elections; while in 1996, the Democratic Left (the new name the Communists took on) polled 30% in the Scottish Hill of Beath local government by-election, at Labour's expense.

The Socialist Party mentioned in the article, meanwhile, is the successor to the once-feared Militant Tendency, which in the mid-eighties took over the ruling Labour group on Liverpool city council. In Scotland, Militant activist Tommy Sheridan founded the Scottish Socialist Party, which soon swallowed up the Communists and the Socialist Workers Party and currently has 6 MPs in Scottish parliament, after having polled over 6% of the vote in the 2003 elections.

And of course, there's Galloway himself, the now ex-Labour dissident who won his Glasgow Kelvin seat in the House of Commons with 51% of the vote in 1997 and 45% in 2001.

(Heh. Never thought I'd be able to hook that random September afternoon's bit of research up to some post here ... ;-)

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Just a shortie - its kinda funny in a sad way:

Quote:

Aviation Leak dryly reports that Pentagon planners still have little idea how to go about an admittedly difficult task--finding terrorists in small groups. According to the magazine, the Defense Science Board recently sent around a memo declaring that "if you've got a good idea" on combating terrorism, please "turn it in as fast as possible" because in the current budget, the supply of antiterrorism money exceeds the supply of antiterrorism concepts. (source)

--------------------------

Just repeating this bit of Gel's post so as to bookmark it for myself ... remember how angry some posters on this board would become if any of us said the Iraq war was "illegal", how they would try to ridicule the very notion?

Gelisgesti wrote:

Quote:
[..] the influential Pentagon hawk Richard Perle conceded that the invasion of Iraq had been illegal.

In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."

President George Bush has consistently argued that the war was legal either because of existing UN security council resolutions on Iraq [..] or as an act of self-defence permitted by international law.

But Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone", and this would have been morally unacceptable.

SOURCE

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gosh, who woulda thunk it?

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Now that GW admitted there was no connection between Iraq and al Qaida, and that Perle said the invasion was illegal. where do we go from here?

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Seems GW has a good chance of winning the next election. Something is definiately wrong with this picture - IMHO.

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Iran, Syria?

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God appointed GW.
Since God has destined GW to be President it is of course no consequence to break any man made laws.

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nimh, thanks for your well considered commentary on the Bush-doesn't-do-funerals issue. I for one will not talk about it any more. I did not find, here or elsewhere, any links that informed me, so will not pursue it.

I chuckled about your link to the article where Richard Perle spoke of illegal actions. Did you note in the original article (posted by someone, a few pages back) that one man who was quoted commented that he did not think any polls in the US that showed support for the Iraq war would have registered differently if this country's citizens had known that the action was illegal. That was the striking point to take away from his disclosure.

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Walter and Steve, what is this Ros thing? An inside joke?

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Bush/Blair press conference from this am now showing on c-span2

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Quote:

Iraq Press: Former Baathists distance themselves from Saddam

Baghdad, Iraq Press, November 20, 2003 - Members of the outlawed Baath party have formed a provisional leadership to disassociate themselves from the atrocities of the ousted leader Saddam Hussein.

The command, established recently, has issued a statement in which it denounces Saddam Hussein as a dictator and distances itself from the current wave of attacks against Iraqi civilians and US occupation forces blamed on his followers.

The US-led Coalition Provisional Authority currently administering the country has abolished the Baath party and banned its senior members from holding public positions.

But it is not clear whether the new anti-Saddam splinter group is allowed to operate. Its degree of influence in the ranks of the former ruling party is also not known.

"Saddam Hussein usurped authority and used his cronies in senior posts to assist him as servants. He executed many senior members of the Baath party, plunged the country and nation into reckless wars and isolated Iraq and wasted its riches," a statement, the new provisional command issued in Baghdad, said.

"We condemn the crimes of the former regime and the atrocities the ousted president committed against the Iraqis," the statement said.

News of the creation of the new leadership comes amid reports of a fresh statement signed by Saddam Hussein's Baath party declaring that armed resistance would continue despite plans by the US-led coalition and CPA's chief administrator Paul Bremer to accelerate the transfer of power to Iraqis.

But the new provisional Baath leadership denounced Saddam Hussein, saying its members have nothing to do with him.

Interesting ... A split among the remnants of the Ba'ath Party, and a "distancing" of itself by this new self-proclaimed "Leadership" from both Saddam and resistance, with specific disapproval of attacks on civilians. I wonder if this might be an indication the current Coalition offensives are haveng beneficial effect. I wonder too, if anything of the sort is indicated, and if any more will be heard about this. None the less, it is intriguing.

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The UN, US and Iraq IV

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