THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ VI

Yes it is a simplistic answer. The waiting for enough evidence to cause those who had a vested interest in the continuation of Saddam's regime to approve replacement of Saddam is in deed simplistic.



The first and worse consequence of delay is increased fatalities and injuries to both the Iraqis and the Americans.



That's BS! We now have considerable intelligence that Saddam after 1993 was distributing billions in funds that he pilfered from the Oil-for-Food program to TMM (i.e., Terrorist Murderers and Maimers) groups around the world. Yes Saddam didn't have much of an army, but he had billions of dollars to sponsor the TMM. The TMM are a major threat to us.



No! I'm claiming many of the Al Qaeda TMM fled Afghanistan for Iraq after we attacked Afghanistan in October 2001 and before we attacked Iraq in March 2003. Thus, it was necessary to attack Iraq to complete the eradication of the former Afghani Al Qaeda residents. One by one we should eradicate the sponsors of Al Qaeda and other TMM. I hope this won't require additional invasions, but it might.



I think that both Kerry and Bush believe all the stuff they say at the time they say it. Of course after I earn my Certificate of Mind Reading, I may change my mind . In my opinion, the one who tells the least number of falsities about substantive events, is the one who is the more competent. While it's little to brag about, I think Bush tells fewer falsities than Kerry.

I'm not even sure we're living on the same planet anymore.



Can you provide a credible source showing this to be true? It seems to me that the vast majority of evidence has pointed away from this....



Actually, I think you would be hard-put to show me credible, quotable sources that would prove this. Unnamed government officials and 'obtained' documents don't count.

What strikes me about your argument, however, is that we DO have much more proof saying that the money used by Al Quaeda comes from.... Saudia Arabia! But have we invaded them? By your rationale, we should have taken them out WAY before Sadaam.

Cycloptichorn

Sure you are, you just don't agree.



Can you provide the vast majority of evidence that you speak of?



Of course they only count when they are used against the administration, not when they are used for the administration. I think the preponderance of evidence from the oil-for-food investigation has shown that there was much underhandedness going on. Surely you are capable of doing SOME research aren't you?



You do understand the difference between money from a dictator who starves his citizens and money from private citizens, right? The Saudi government was not providing al Qaeda with any money...or do you have facts to back up your statements? I think you would be hard-put to show me credible, quotable sources that would prove this. Unnamed government officials and 'obtained' documents don't count.

I'm based on planet earth, the third planet from the sun. Where are you based?



What is credible to some is fantasy to others. The credible sources for what I have claimed about Saddam and Al Qaeda are contained in this forum and have been posted by others as well as by me.


What does count? A government commission that refrains from investigating a key witness like Gorelick? Opinion articles? Opinion statements by the left but not those by the right? Stuff that supports what you believe but not stuff that supports what you don't believe? Much of it has been posted in this forum.



Follow the Oil-for-Food money! It's bigger than the Saudi money.

We have a great deal of evidence that the money contributed to Al Qaeda by Saudi Arabians is substantial. We have some evidence to show some of those contributions come from the Saudi government. I personally suspect that some of those contributions come from the Saudi royal family. For now, though, we currently have our hands full with our Afghanistan and Iraq invasions.

Did I miss something?

What DOES count? By the differing rationales that we use, we could sit here and show how each other's sources are bunk all day long.

You claim the 9/11 commission is unreliable because they didn't consider the testimony of a key witness. I claim that 'unamed' government sources are not reliable, and therefore McG's argument is bunk.

I've been looking into oil-for-food and it sure doesn't look good for anyone involved, but I haven't seen a large amount of evidence to show that that money went to Al Quaeda or any other terrorist organization.

I'm sort of at a loss on how to proceed; I'd rather debate the merits of policy than spend all day attacking people's sources, and I'm sure you don't want that either, yet it remains neccessary to have credible backup in order to avoid threads full of baseless assertions...

Cycloptichorn

McGentrix,

I think I may finally have got it!

On the far left,
He is no damn good who seeks to conserve the security of the liberty of humanity's posterity at the cost of the current lives of some of humanity.

On the far right,
He is no damn good who opposes seeking to conserve the security of the liberty of humanity's posterity at the cost of the current lives of some of humanity.

Cyclo, You have the patience of a saint; I don't. LOL

Me too!

Let's debate our individual opinions on the merits of various policies. In particular let's debate policies for how we ought to straighten out the mess in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia.

Examples:
(1) The US publically announces that the US will leave Afghanistan or Iran at the request of the either's government. The US further announces that the US will replace the government of any country that it discovers is probably sponsoring TMM.
(2) The US will attack Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia to stop their aid of the TMM.
(3) The US will remain in all three of these countries until the TMM or the TMM sponsors in these countries are eradicated.
(4) The US will continue to do whatever it has been doing.
(5) The US will emulate the British in 1948 by abandoning the Middle East.

Probably! Do you think you missed something? Why?

I think, the 'politics' of medieval robber-knights are to understand better than some ideas of ican711nm.

Yes: YOUR invasion to Afghanistan.

What do you call US troops entering Afghanistan in October, 2001 and remaining there while they kill people and break things?

"Suppose the western powers occupying Iraq were largely to withdraw to the capital, leaving the warlords, their militias and remnants of the former regime to divide the rest of the country up among
themselves.
Suppose they were to cut their troop numbers to a sixth of the current total, and were to offer half as much aid per person. Suppose, in short, that the western powers were to do less and risk less but leave themselves less exposed to insurrections, sabotage or bad publicity as a result. Iraq would then look much like the West's other post-9/11 protectorate, Afghanistan. There, little is ventured, precious little is gained, but, as a result, not much is reported either."

-- The Economist, 16 June 2004
http://www.economist.com/agenda/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2764329

Your are right, ican, the Zionist Ashkenazi conquered Palestine, they defeated and subdued by force of arms, they maimed and murdered to gain dominion over Palestine, and in your mind there is legitimacy in that. The law of the jungle. But then, you decry the maiming and murdering that the fanatics perpetrate in retaliation. So then, you condone some maiming and murdering but not other maiming and murdering. It depends on who exactly is the one perpetrating it, and your disposition towards them, I suppose. You are not consistent in your denunciation of maiming and murdering.

Homicidal maniacs in Palestine will never be eradicated from either side--remember, it was a Jewish Israeli homicidal maniac who assassinated a fellow Jew, the Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, quoting halakha as his justification for the assassination--and putting up the requisite of their complete eradication is a pretext that the state of Israel uses to perpetuate the status quo, and the status quo only guarantees the perpetuation of homicidal maniacs which then serves to perpetuate the status quo ad infinitum ad nauseum. Again, ican, by basing your decisions on the actions of the homicidal maniacal minority, you'd give them, as Israel does right now, a legitimacy they do not deserve. You'd be, like Israel is right now, an enabler of homicidal maniacs, ican.

Yeah, I guess you can think of Israel as a pluralistic state much like the US was a pluralistic state during the times of the jim crow laws and segregation. The US was pluralistic during those times, wasn't it? Israel in all of its plurality gives any Jew in the world the right of naturalization and immigration to Israel, but yet it denies the Palestinian Arabs the Right of Return. That's a deed based on the "delusion caused malady" of "pretense of superiority."

Yes, in the US Constitution we also have specific requirements for loyalty to a set of ideas for elected and appointed officials. And if the US Constitution would have the directive to affirm an Anglo Saxon/Protestant character of the U.S. of A., the U.S. of A. would be an ethnocentric state mandating the "delusion caused malady" of "pretense of superiority."

Maybe you didn't read what I had written carefully, ican:

In 1920 Palestinian Jews, the Jewish Arabs, living in Palestine at the time, signed anti-Zionist petitions denouncing Ashkenazi rule.

They were responding to the Eurocentric chauvinism, discrimination and racism that the Ashkenazim brought with them from Europe. Read what Ahad Ha'Am (Asher Ginsberg) had to say about the Ashkenazi immigrants to Palestine at the turn of the century. And if you try to dismiss him as just "this or that Jew," remember, for being merely "this or that Jew," he was instrumental in securing Britain's Balfour Declaration. For a taste of this mentality in the modern day read any of steissd's posts here on A2K on the Arab Jews in Israel.

From the editorial page of the New York Times this morning regarding the forthcoming 9-11 commission report that will say clearly that there never was a connection between Al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime.




Please call the White House today and ask them to stop lying.

Joe

joe

I just phoned. Whoever answered promised that my concerns would be addressed at the highest levels.

Floral greetings from Iraqis...
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=532337

clearly that there never was a connection between Al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime.

Clearly? Why then do they comment on an envoy from Iraq meeting with al Qaeda? What about Abdul Rahman Yasin was the only member of the al Qaeda cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb to remain at large in the Clinton years. He fled to Iraq. U.S. forces recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, that show that Iraq gave Mr. Yasin both a house and monthly salary.

Sudanese intelligence officials reported that their agents had observed meetings between Iraqi intelligence agents and bin Laden starting in 1994, when bin Laden lived in Khartoum. In 1999 the Guardian, a British newspaper, reported that Farouk Hijazi, a senior officer in Iraq's mukhabarat, had journeyed deep into the icy mountains near Kandahar, Afghanistan, in December 1998 to meet with al Qaeda men. Mr. Hijazi is "thought to have offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq," the Guardian reported.

In October 2000, another Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested near the Afghan border by Pakistani authorities, according to Jane's Foreign Report, a respected international newsletter. Jane's reported that Suleiman was shuttling between Iraqi intelligence and Ayman al Zawahiri, now al Qaeda's No. 2 man. Spanish investigators have uncovered documents seized from Yusuf Galan -- who is charged by a Spanish court with being "directly involved with the preparation and planning" of the Sept. 11 attacks -- that show the terrorist was invited to a party at the Iraqi embassy in Madrid. The invitation used his "al Qaeda nom de guerre," London's Independent reports. An Iraqi defector to Turkey, known by his cover name as "Abu Mohammed," told Gwynne Roberts of the Sunday Times of London that he saw bin Laden's fighters in camps in Iraq in 1997. At the time, Mohammed was a colonel in Saddam's Fedayeen. He described an encounter at Salman Pak, the training facility southeast of Baghdad. At that vast compound run by Iraqi intelligence, Muslim militants trained to hijack planes with knives -- on a full-size Boeing 707. Col. Mohammed recalls his first visit to Salman Pak this way: "We were met by Colonel Jamil Kamil, the camp manager, and Major Ali Hawas. I noticed that a lot of people were queuing for food. (The major) said to me: 'You'll have nothing to do with these people. They are Osama bin Laden's group and the PKK and Mojahedin-e Khalq.'"

In 1998, Abbas al-Janabi, a longtime aide to Saddam's son Uday, defected to the West. At the time, he repeatedly told reporters that there was a direct connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. Zarqawi met with military chief of al Qaeda, Mohammed Ibrahim Makwai (aka Saif al-Adel) in Iran in February 2003, according to intelligence sources cited by the Washington Post.

Mohamed Mansour Shahab, a smuggler hired by Iraq to transport weapons to bin Laden in Afghanistan, was arrested by anti-Hussein Kurdish forces in May, 2000. He later told his story to American intelligence and a reporter for the New Yorker magazine.

Mullah Melan Krekar, ran a terror group (the Ansar al-Islam) linked to both bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Mr. Krekar admitted to a Kurdish newspaper that he met bin Laden in Afghanistan and other senior al Qaeda officials. His acknowledged meetings with bin Laden go back to 1988. When he organized Ansar al Islam in 2001 to conduct suicide attacks on Americans, "three bin Laden operatives showed up with a gift of $300,000 'to undertake jihad,'" Newsday reported. Mr. Krekar is now in custody in the Netherlands. His group operated in portion of northern Iraq loyal to Saddam Hussein -- and attacked independent Kurdish groups hostile to Saddam. A spokesman for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan told a United Press International correspondent that Mr. Krekar's group was funded by "Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad."

Some skeptics dismiss the emerging evidence of a longstanding link between Iraq and al Qaeda by contending that Saddam ran a secular dictatorship hated by Islamists like bin Laden.

In fact, there are plenty of "Stalin-Roosevelt" partnerships between international terrorists and Muslim dictators. Saddam and bin Laden had common enemies, common purposes and interlocking needs. They shared a powerful hate for America and the Saudi royal family. They both saw the Gulf War as a turning point. Saddam suffered a crushing defeat which he had repeatedly vowed to avenge. Bin Laden regards the U.S. as guilty of war crimes against Iraqis and believes that non-Muslims shouldn't have military bases on the holy sands of Arabia. Al Qaeda's avowed goal for the past ten years has been the removal of American forces from Saudi Arabia, where they stood in harm's way solely to contain Saddam.

The most compelling reason for bin Laden to work with Saddam is money. Al Qaeda operatives have testified in federal courts that the terror network was always desperate for cash. Senior employees fought bitterly about the $100 difference in pay between Egyptian and Saudis (the Egyptians made more). One al Qaeda member, who was connected to the 1998 embassy bombings, told a U.S. federal court how bitter he was that bin Laden could not pay for his pregnant wife to see a doctor.

Bin Laden's personal wealth alone simply is not enough to support a profligate global organization. Besides, bin Laden's fortune is probably not as large as some imagine. Informed estimates put bin Laden's pre-Sept. 11, 2001 wealth at perhaps $30 million. $30 million is the budget of a small school district, not a global terror conglomerate. Meanwhile, Forbes estimated Saddam's personal fortune at $2 billion.

So a common enemy, a shared goal and powerful need for cash seem to have forged an alliance between Saddam and bin Laden. CIA Director George Tenet recently told the Senate Intelligence Committee: "Iraq has in the past provided training in document forgery and bomb making to al Qaeda. It also provided training in poisons and gasses to two al Qaeda associates; one of these [al Qaeda] associates characterized the relationship as successful. Mr. Chairman, this information is based on a solid foundation of intelligence. It comes to us from credible and reliable sources. Much of it is corroborated by multiple sources."

The Iraqis, who had the Third World's largest poison-gas operations prior to the Gulf War I, have perfected the technique of making hydrogen-cyanide gas, which the Nazis called Zyklon-B. In the hands of al Qaeda, this would be a fearsome weapon in an enclosed space -- like a suburban mall or subway station.

Yet, it is CLEAR that there is no connection...

McG

Please forward your concerns to the commission. Likely they are unawares of your facts.

And here's a piece that we could title The Greening of Iraq...
http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/06/16/bar/index.html