THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ VI

cicerone imposter wrote:

I'll gloat when Bush and his cronies are sent back to Texas in November. I may even throw a party!

Just be sure you stock up on tissues for all the weeping. :wink:

Can anyone think of ANYTHING positive to say about Iraq since G W Bush announced "mission accomplished" ?

... the invasion has not helped the cause of peace in the middle east one jot. It has made it worse.

The Israelis now think they are untouchable. They can do anything they want to establish their greater Israel.

Tissues wouldn't work; we'll need those towels to clean up all the blood.

Scrat wrote:

cicerone imposter wrote:

I'll gloat when Bush and his cronies are sent back to Texas in November. I may even throw a party!

Just be sure you stock up on tissues for all the weeping. :wink:

I bet they'll not weep, Scrat. I bet that they are already preparing to protest this election after Bush wins it. Their approach this time won't only be seeking multiple vote recounts for selected voter districts; they'll be demanding that the invalidly-registered and non-registered (including dead ones) should not been discriminated against and should have been allowed to vote, and, therefore, should then be fairly compensated by allowing them to vote in the election as many times as such voters wish before the final count is determined.

Myth #1: America turned off its allies. According to John Kerry, due to
inept American diplomacy and unilateral arrogance, the United States
failed to get the Europeans and the U.N. on board for the war in Iraq.
Thus, unlike in Afghanistan, we find ourselves alone.

In fact, there are only about 4,500-5,500 NATO troops in Afghanistan
right now. The United States and its Anglo allies routed the Taliban by
themselves. NATO contingents in Afghanistan are not commensurate with
either the size or the wealth of Europe.

There are far more Coalition troops in Iraq presently than in
Afghanistan. As in the Balkans, NATO and EU troops will arrive only when
the United States has achieved victory and provided security. The same
goes for the U.N., which did nothing in Serbia and Rwanda, but watched
thousands being butchered under its nose. It fled from Iraq after its
first losses.

Yes, the U.N. will return to Iraq ÷ but only when the United States
defeats the insurrectionists. It will stay away if we don't. American
victory or defeat, as has been true from Korea to the Balkans, will
alone determine the degree of (usually post-bellum) participation of
others.

Myth #2: Democracy cannot be implemented by force. This is a very
popular canard now. The myth is often floated by Middle Eastern
intellectuals and American leftists ÷ precisely those who for a
half-century damned the United States for its support of anti-Communist
authoritarians.

Now that their dreams of strong U.S. advocacy for consensual government
have been realized, they are panicking at that sudden nightmare ÷
terrified that their fides, their careers, indeed their entire boutique
personas might be endangered by finding themselves on the same side of
history as the United States. Worse, history really does suggest that
democracy often follows only from force or its threat.

One does not have to go back to ancient Athens ÷ in 507 or 403 B.C. ÷ to
grasp the depressing fact that most authoritarians do not surrender
power voluntarily. There would be no democracy today in Japan, South
Korea, Italy, or Germany without the Americans' defeat of fascists and
Communists. Democracies in France and most of Western Europe were born
from Anglo-American liberation; European resistance to German occupation
was an utter failure. Panama, Granada, Serbia, and Afghanistan would
have had no chance of a future without the intervention of American
troops.

All of Eastern Europe is free today only because of American deterrence
and decades of military opposition to Communism. Very rarely in the
modern age do democratic reforms emerge spontaneously and indigenously
(ask the North Koreans, Cubans, or North Vietnamese). Tragically,
positive change almost always appears after a war in which
authoritarians lose or are discredited (Argentina or Greece), bow to
economic or cultural coercion (South Africa), or are forced to hold
elections (Nicaragua).

Myth #3: Lies got us into this war. Did the administration really
mislead us about the reasons to go to war, and does it really now find
itself with an immoral conflict on its hands? Mr. Bush's lectures about
WMD, while perhaps privileging such fears over more pressing practical
and humanitarian reasons to remove Saddam Hussein, took their cue from
prior warnings from Bill Clinton, senators of both parties including
John Kerry, and both the EU and U.N.

If anyone goes back to read justifications for Desert Fox (December
1998) or those issued right after September 11 by an array of American
politicians, then it is clear that Mr. Bush simply repeated the usual
Western litany of about a decade or so ÷ most of it best formulated by
the Democratic party under Bill Clinton. Indeed, we opted to launch that
campaign in large part because of Iraq's work on WMDs.

No, the real rub is whether Iraq will work: If it does, the WMD bogeyman
disappears; if not, it becomes the surrogate issue to justify
withdrawing.

Myth #4: Profit-making led to this war. Then there is the strange idea
that American administration officials profited from the war. Companies
like Bechtel and Halliburton are supposedly "cashing in," either on oil
contracts or rebuilding projects ÷ as if any company is lining up to
lure thousands of workers to the Iraqi oasis to lounge and cheat in such
a paradise.

This idea is absurd for a variety of other reasons, too. Iraqi oil is
for the first time under Iraqi, rather than a dictator's, control. And
the Iraqi people most certainly will not sign over their future oil
reserves to greedy companies in the manner that Saddam gave French
consortia almost criminally profitable contracts. Indeed, no Iraqi
politician is going to demand to pump more oil to lower gas prices in
the country that freed him. Some imperialism.

All U.S. construction is subject to open audit and assessment. A zealous
media has not yet found any signs of endemic or secret corruption. There
really is a giant scandal surrounding Iraq, but it involves (1) the
United Nations Oil-for-Food program, in which U.N. officials and Saddam
Hussein, hand-in-glove with European and Russian oil companies, robbed
revenues from the Iraqi people; and (2) French petroleum interests that
strong-armed a tottering dictator to sign over his country's national
treasure to Parisian profiteers under conditions that no consensual
government would ever agree to. The only legitimate accusation of Iraqi
profiteering does not involve Dick Cheney or Halliburton, but rather
Kofi Annan's negligence and his son Kojo's probable malfeasance.

Myth #5: Israel has caused the United States untold headaches in the
Arab world by its intransigent policies. The refutation of this myth
could take volumes, given the depth of daily misinformation. Perhaps,
though, we can sum up the absurdity by looking at the nature of West
Bank demonstrations over the past few months.

The issues baffle Americans: Some Arab citizens of Israel, residing in
almost entirely Arab border towns and calling themselves Palestinians,
were furious about Mr. Sharon's offer to cede them sovereign Israeli
soil and thus allow them to join the new Palestinian nation. Others were
hysterical that two killers ÷ who promised not merely the "liberation"
of the West Bank, but also the utter destruction of Israel ÷ were in
fact killed in a war by Israelis. Both of the deceased had damned the
United States and expressed support for Islamicists now killing our
soldiers in Iraq ÷ even as their supporters whined that we did not
lament their recent departures to a much-praised paradise.

Elsewhere fiery demonstrators were shaking keys to houses that they have
not been residing in for 60 years ÷ furious about the forfeiture of the
"right of return" and their inability to migrate to live out their lives
in the hated "Zionist entry." Notably absent were the relatives of the
hundreds of thousands of Jews of Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, and other
Arab capitals who years ago were all ethnically cleansed and sent
packing from centuries-old homes, but apparently got on with what was
left of their lives.

The Palestinians will, in fact, get their de facto state, though one
that may be now cut off entirely from Israeli commerce and cultural
intercourse. This is an apparently terrifying thought: Palestinian men
can no longer blow up Jews on Monday, seek dialysis from them on
Tuesday, get an Israeli paycheck on Wednesday, demonstrate to CNN
cameras about the injustice of it all on Thursday ÷ and then go back to
tunneling under Gaza and three-hour, all-male, conspiracy-mongering
sessions in coffee-houses on Friday. Beware of getting what you bomb
for.

Perhaps the absurdity of the politics of the Middle East is best summed
up by the recent visit of King Abdullah of Jordan, a sober and judicious
autocrat, or so we are told. As the monarch of an authoritarian state,
recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars in annual American aid, son
of a king who backed Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War, and a leader
terrified that the Israeli fence might encourage Palestinian immigration
into his own Arab kingdom, one might have thought that he could spare us
the moral lectures at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club ÷ especially
when his elite Jordanian U.N. peacekeepers were just about to murder
American citizens in Kosovo while terrorists in his country tried to
mass murder Americans with gas.

Instead we got the broken-record Middle East sermon on why Arabs don't
like Americans ÷ as if we had forgotten 9/11 and its
quarter-century-long precursors. Does this sensible autocrat ÷ perhaps
the most reasonable man in the region ÷ ever ask himself about questions
of symmetry and reciprocity?

Is there anything like a Commonwealth Club in Amman? And if not, why
not? And could a Mr. Blair or Mr. Bush in safety and freedom visit Amman
to hold a public press conference, much less to lecture his Jordanian
hosts on why Americans in general ÷ given state-sponsored terrorism,
Islamic extremism, and failed Middle Eastern regimes ÷ have developed
such unfavorable attitudes towards so many Arab societies?

What then is the truth of this so-often-caricatured war?

On the bright side, there has not been another 9/11 mass-murder. And
this is due entirely to our increased vigilance, the latitude given our
security people by the hated Patriot Act, and the idea that the war (not
a DA's inquiry) should be fought abroad not at home.

The Taliban was routed and Afghanistan has the brightest hopes in thirty
years. Pakistan, so unlike 1998, is not engaged in breakneck nuclear
proliferation abroad. Libya claims a new departure from its recent past.
Syria fears a nascent dissident movement. Saddam is gone. Iran is
hysterical about new scrutiny. American troops are out of Saudi Arabia.

True, we are facing various groups jockeying for power in a new Iraq;
and the country is still unsettled. Yet millions of Kurds are satisfied
and pro-American. Millions more Shiites want political power ÷ and think
that they can get it constitutionally through us rather than out of the
barrel of a gun following an unhinged thug. After all, any fool who
names his troops "Mahdists" is sorely misinformed about the fate of the
final resting place of the Great Mahdi, the couplets of Hilaire Beloc,
and what happened to thousands of Mahdist zealots at Omdurman.

So, we can either press ahead in the face of occasionally bad news from
Iraq (though it will never be of the magnitude that once came from Sugar
Loaf Hill or the icy plains near the Yalu that did not faze a prior
generation's resolve) ÷ or we can withdraw. Then watch the entire
three-year process of real improvement start to accelerate in reverse.
If after 1975 we thought that over a million dead in Cambodia, another
million on rickety boats fleeing Vietnam, another half-million sent to
camps or executed, hundreds of thousands of refugees arriving in
America, a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, an Iranian take-over of the
U.S. embassy, oil-embargos, Communist entry into Central America, a
quarter-century of continual terrorist attacks, and national invective
were bad, just watch the new world emerge when Saddam's Mafioso or Mr.
Sadr's Mahdists force our departure.

This war was always a gamble, but not for the reasons many Americans
think. We easily had, as proved, the military power to defeat Saddam; we
embraced the idealism and humanity to eschew realpolitik and offer
something different in the place of mass murder. And we are winning on
all fronts at a cost that by any historical measure has confirmed both
our skill and resolve.

But the lingering question ÷ one that has never been answered ÷ was
always our attention and will. The administration assumed that in
occasional times of the inevitable bad news, we were now more like the
generation that endured the surprise of Okinawa and Pusan rather than
Tet and Mogadishu. All were bloody fights; all were similarly
controversial and unexpected; all were alike proof of the fighting
excellence of the American soldiers ÷ but not all were seen as such by
Americans. The former were detours on the road to victory and eventual
democracy; the latter led to self-recrimination, defeat, and chaos in
our wake.

The choice between myth and reality is ours once more.

From: http://www.schwartzreport.net/
Friday, April 30, 2004

Enough

By Stephan A. Schwartz
Editor
Schwartzreport.com

I lived through the Viet Nam war ... But once again, a tiny cadre of political leaders given the great levers of power has succumbed to evil dreams of blood and iron. ...

do you feel less or more fear than you did, say five years ago?

It is not the problem, but the choice of the solution that is my source of grief. We have chosen a geopolitical proposition -- unilateral might makes right --

Besides, I don't think ican heard your "BINGO!"