THE US, THE UN AND THE IRAQIS THEMSELVES, V. 7.0

Quote:

U.S. Embassy in Iraq to Be World's Largest
Friday, February 06, 2004

While the future U.S. diplomatic presence in Baghdad is still in the planning phases, officials here agree that an enormous American contingent — of 3,000 or more U.S. employees — will be required in Iraq long after July 1, when the United States plans to turn over sovereignty to Iraqis.

"It most likely will be the largest in the world for some time," a U.S. official in Washington said Friday on condition of anonymity.

I assume that fox news is acceptable by you?

Fact: Bin Laden's dream of Dar Al-Islaam is actually held back by the ruling gov'ts of the individual countries.

Fact: One of Bin Laden's major stated goals is to remove said governments.

Conclusion: in taking out Saddam, we are doing Bin Laden's work for him, no matter what 'justifications' you want to use.

www.9-11commission.gov/report/index.htm
[Chapt. 2.4]
To protect his own ties with Iraq, Turabi reportedly brokered an agreement that Bin Ladin would stop supporting activities against Saddam. Bin Ladin apparently honored this pledge, at least for a time, although he continued to aid a group of Islamist extremists operating in part of Iraq (Kurdistan) outside of Baghdad's control. In the late 1990s, these extremist groups suffered major defeats by Kurdish forces. In 2001, with Bin Ladin's help they re-formed into an organization called Ansar al Islam. There are indications that by then the Iraqi regime tolerated and may even have helped Ansar al Islam against the common Kurdish enemy.54

[Chapt. 2.3]
Bin Ladin Moves to Sudan
By the fall of 1989, Bin Ladin had sufficient stature among Islamic extremists that a Sudanese political leader, Hassan al Turabi, urged him to transplant his whole organization to Sudan. Turabi headed the National Islamic Front in a coalition that had recently seized power in Khartoum.30 Bin Ladin agreed to help Turabi in an ongoing war against African Christian separatists in southern Sudan and also to do some road building. Turabi in return would let Bin Ladin use Sudan as a base for worldwide business operations and for preparations for jihad.31

Mohammed B., the man accused of killing Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam last week, was born and bred in the Netherlands, "known as a relaxed, friendly and intelligent young man," a good student, a volunteer social worker, and a serious student of Information Technology. He came from a close family, and the death of his mother three years ago hit him very hard. He began to devote more time to religious studies, and in the last year became increasingly fanatic. He abandoned his social work because he refused to serve alcohol, and because the foundation where he volunteered organized events where both sexes were present. He was on welfare when he killed van Gogh.


We have seen this sort before; Mohammed B. is the Dutch-Moroccan version of the British-Pakistani killer of Daniel Pearl. Both came from good families that had to all appearances successfully assimilated into Western society. Both were well educated and upwardly mobile. Both had money and opportunity. Neither suffered unusual discrimination. Both lived in politically correct, meticulously tolerant societies that permitted no intrusion on their private lives. There was no apparent reason, either psychological or sociological, why either should have become a killer. Yet each freely chose ˜ freely chose ˜ to become a terrorist.


Each also chose to perform a ritual murder. Both beheaded (or, in the van Gogh killing, all-but-beheaded) their victims. This has long been a trademark of radical Islamist terrorists, whose videos of beheadings were used recruit new jihadists to their ranks long before they were broadcast around the world. The recruits join the jihad precisely because they want to behead the infidels and crusaders who are the objects of their hatred. Mohammed B. added a macabre twist: he left a message of hatred for Jews, Christians, Europeans and Americans impaled to van Gogh's chest with the murder weapon, a bloody dagger.


Mohammed B. was no lone wolf; within a few days, Dutch police had arrested seven other members of what they claimed was a terrorist group, and Spanish authorities said they believed the order for the ritual murder had come from terrorist leaders in their country. If that is correct, the van Gogh slaughter wasn't merely the result of local circumstances, but rather the product of a continental network of like-minded fanatics.


As the outstanding Italian journalist Magdi Allam sadly noted in the Corriere della Sera a few days after the event, the murder of van Gogh probably marked the end of Europe's multicultural utopian dream, because it forces politically correct Europeans to face an identity crisis that is eerily symmetrical with the same sort of crisis that has been afflicting Muslims for the past 30 years. Both were provoked by Western victories: The humiliation of Arab armies by Israel in 1967, and the defeat and dissolution of the Soviet Empire.


The Six-Day War and the ensuing collapse of the dream of a pan-Arab empire catalyzed a resurgence of fundamentalist Islam and its intense intolerance of social, religious and political freedoms. In Allam's neat formulation, al Qaeda represents the privatization and globalization of Islamic terrorism in its crudest and most hateful form. Yet it appeals to many Muslims, including some living and even born in the West, because they find it spiritually fulfilling, and also because there is no spiritual force in Europe capable of challenging it.


As things stand, the Europeans are so enthralled by cultural relativism and political correctness that they are totally unwilling to challenge any idea, even the jihadists' program of creating a theocratic state within Western civil society. The terrorist groups consider themselves autonomous, a community of believers opposed to the broader community of unbelievers and apostates.


The killing of Theo van Gogh is a textbook case of what happens when a tolerant but confused society takes political correctness to its illogical extreme. For Mohammed B. did not choose terrorism all by himself. He was indoctrinated and recruited in a mosque where he was pumped full of the Wahabbi doctrine "predominant in Saudi Arabia." The murder of van Gogh was an instant replay of the many murders carried out by Zarqawi and his followers in Iraq, extolled by fanatical Muslim Imams. As Allam reminds us, not all mosques are fundamentalist, extremist, or terrorist, but all the fundamentalists, extremists, and terrorists got that way in mosques.


The Dutch ˜ like every other European society I know ˜ were unwilling to recognize that they had potentially lethal enemies within, and that it was necessary to impose the rules of civil behavior on everyone within their domain. The rules of political correctness made it impossible even to criticize the jihadists, never mind compel them to observe the rules of civil society. Just look at what happened the next day: An artist in Rotterdam improvised a wall fresco that consisted of an angel and the words "Thou Shalt Not Kill." The local imam protested, and local authorities removed the fresco.


That's what happens when a culture is relativized to the point of suicide. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once remarked of an American politician, "he can longer distinguish between our friends and our enemies, and so he has ended by adopting our enemies' view of the world." This has now befallen Europe, which cannot distinguish between free societies ˜ their natural friends ˜ like the United States and Israel, and has ended by embracing enemies such as the radical Islamist regimes and elevating Yasser Arafat to near beatific stature.


The process by which the Europeans arrived at this grave impasse has been going on ever since the late 19th century, when the intelligentsia revolted against "bourgeois society" and its values, and sought for deeper meaning in acts of nihilistic violence, in fascism and communism, and in vast wars that engulfed the rest of the world. The Europeans might have confronted their spiritual crisis after the Second World War (some brave souls, like Albert Camus, tried), but the Cold War tamped it down. With a huge enemy on their borders, the Europeans finessed the issue, opted for a soulless materialism (that has given them a nanny state and a birth rate that promises to extinguish them in relatively short order), and pretended that the core of Western civilization was irrelevant to their lives.


When the Cold War ended, the crisis was still there, but they projected it onto us. The United States "needed an enemy," they scoffed, because otherwise we could not define our mission. But they were the ones who had lost their enemy, and thus had to face their own terrible contradictions and moral failures. Now they deride us because of our presumed archaic faith. They even equate American religion with the fundamentalism that now menaces them inside their model cities and threatens their enormously self-satisfied secular utopia.


Holland is now in the grips of violent reaction. Mosques and religious schools are firebombed. Emergency legislation granting new intrusive powers to security services has been enabled. The Dutch are groping for a "solution," but they are still ducking the real problem, which, to their consternation, we are dealing with more effectively and far more self-confidently. "The multicultural crisis," Magdi Allam wisely reminds us, "should teach us that only a West with a strong religious, cultural and moral identity can challenge and open itself to the 'others' in a constructive and peaceful way. And that the goal must be a system of shared values within a common identity."

revel wrote:

Quote:

U.S. Embassy in Iraq to Be World's Largest
Friday, February 06, 2004

I assume that fox news is acceptable by you?

Also, the "evidence" of Powell's speech and the 9/11 Commission upon which you base your argument is self-describedly UNRELIABLE.

Your "fact" is a non-sequitur, ican.

The prior administration’s missile attacks on Iraq prior to the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq were not intended to disrupt al Qaeda in Iraq.

Main Entry: non se·qui·tur
Pronunciation: 'nän-'se-kw&-t&r also -"tur
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin, it does not follow
1 : an inference that does not follow from the premises; specifically : a fallacy resulting from a simple conversion of a universal affirmative proposition or from the transposition of a condition and its consequent
2 : a statement (as a response) that does not follow logically from anything previously said

Your conclusion, ican, is based on the non-sequitur that the government in Iraq harbored al Qaeda there. That "al Qaeda" was harbored in Iraq is one thing, that the government there harbored them is another, unproven assumption. "Al Qaeda" (it is actually Ansar al-Islam to whom you are referring) were harbored, as I've pointed out to you earlier in this thread, in Northern Iraq, beyond the reach of the government in Iraq. Their activities were sheltered and harbored by both Operation Provide Comfort and subsequently by Operation Northern Watch which enforced no-fly zones in this area of Iraq.

Main Entry: vac·u·ous
Pronunciation: vakyws
Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin vacuus
1 : emptied of or lacking content (as of air or gas) <vacuous spaces>
2 : marked by or indicative of mental vacuity or lack of ideas or intelligence : lacking substance : thin in intellectual content : DULL, STUPID, INANE <a vacuous mind> <a vacuous expression> <a vacuous play>
3 : devoid of serious occupation : spent in inanities or frivolity : IDLE
4 : containing no element, point, or member : NULL -- used of a class in mathematics or logic
synonym see EMPTY

"vacuous." Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Merriam-Webster, 2002. http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com (14 Nov. 2004).

I infer from this that such a large presence in Iraq more than likely gives the impression of an occupation to the people in Iraq.

I mean it sure isn't love of Saddam Hussien so it must be hate of the United States that is driving this ever increasing insurgency and the question then becomes, why? I think it is like I said, they fear that we are there to occupy them ...

Quote:

Main Entry: vac·u·ous
Pronunciation: vakyws
Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin vacuus
1 : emptied of or lacking content (as of air or gas) <vacuous spaces>
2 : marked by or indicative of mental vacuity or lack of ideas or intelligence : lacking substance : thin in intellectual content : DULL, STUPID, INANE <a vacuous mind> <a vacuous expression> <a vacuous play>
3 : devoid of serious occupation : spent in inanities or frivolity : IDLE
4 : containing no element, point, or member : NULL -- used of a class in mathematics or logic
synonym see EMPTY

"vacuous." Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Merriam-Webster, 2002. http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com (14 Nov. 2004).

McTag wrote:

Yes, a statute of limitations would be convenient, to some.

"Okay, yes officer, I shot the guy. But hey, he's dead now. Can't we just forget about it?"

Ya, like you. I'm guessing you'd like it short enough to make Saddam no longer responsible for the hundreds of thousands of people he ordered murdered. (It's too late to undo that, too, btw... but justice is finally going to be served). That, too, has no bearing on our current predicament.

Do you advocate us leaving now?

U.S. military says Iraqi aid not needed in Falluja

FALLUJA, Iraq, Nov 14 (Reuters) - The U.S. military said on Sunday it saw no need for the Iraqi Red Crescent to deliver aid to people inside Falluja and said it did not think any Iraqi civilians were trapped inside the city.

"There is no need to bring (Red Crescent) supplies in because we have supplies of our own for the people," said U.S. Marine Colonel Mike Shupp. "Now that the bridge (into Falluja) is open I will bring out casualties and all aid work can be done here (at Falluja's hospital)."

He said he had not heard of any Iraqi civilians being trapped inside the city and did not think that was the case.

My evidence that the evidence used by Powell and the 9/11 Commission is unreliable is the 9/11 Commission's own words, ican. Read carefully now:

"We have seen other intelligence reports at the CIA about 1999 con-tacts.They are consistent with the conclusions we provide in the text, and their reliability is uncertain."

". . . the most detailed information alleging such ties came from an al Qaeda operative who recanted much of his original information."

"Two senior Bin Ladin associates have adamantly denied that any such ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq."

When one says that something's reliability is uncertain, they are therefor saying that something is unreliable.

I suspect that the al Qaeda operative referred to in the 9/11 report was tourtured, and subsequently recanted much of his original information.

President Bush unleashed the U.S. Marines in Fallujah and Don Rumsfeld at the Pentagon within days of securing a second term. A campaign season of playing it safe on Iraq makes way now for a concerted effort to find a new political order and a different military direction in the war there.

The grim task of retaking Fallujah will help determine the viability of Bush's renewed effort and of the American military presence in Iraq, which cannot remain static. This is where Rumsfeld, relatively taciturn of late, strides back into the picture.

In one sense a visitor to the defense secretary's cavernous office can catch a glimpse of the ultimate goal for which the Marines and Army units have been fighting in Fallujah by glancing at a glass-topped conference table.

Beneath the glass lies a sample ballot from Afghanistan's presidential election. Given to Rumsfeld last month by Hamid Karzai, the election's winner, the ballot represents for the secretary a telling American political and military success in the war on terrorism -- and a future that could soon be in the grasp of Iraqis.

Retaking Fallujah is intended to help clear the way for Iraqi elections in January. But as Rumsfeld pointed out to his theater commanders in a well-publicized memo on "metrics" a year ago, measuring success in this kind of operation is no easy or sure thing.

The key targets of the renewed offensive in the Sunni heartland are not in fact the headline numbers of insurgents killed or captured, or bomb factories seized or obliterated. As Americans learned to their grief in Vietnam, such physical measurements are elusive and illusory in guerrilla warfare. Guerrillas fade away to fight in another place another day.

Fallujah is part of a battle for minds rather than "hearts and minds." In the four Sunni provinces that are in bloody revolt against the U.S. occupation force and the interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, the most important immediate objective is to dissuade Sunni townspeople from joining, supporting or tolerating the insurrection.

The price they will pay for doing so is being illustrated graphically in the streets of Fallujah. But what follows this demonstration of firepower's effect -- that is, what Allawi's unsteady and unpopular administration can do to convince the Sunnis and others in Iraq that they have a stake in peaceful elections in January -- will be the decisive part of this struggle.

That conclusion is reflected not only in the visible importance the Pentagon's boss attaches to Afghanistan's ballot but also in the stunningly clear words spoken Oct. 8 by Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine commander at April's aborted battle for Fallujah. Conway, who is now director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this in a speech at the George P. Shultz Lecture Series in San Francisco:

"I believe there will be elections in Iraq in January and I suspect very shortly afterwards you will start to see a reduction in U.S. forces -- not because U.S. planners will seek it but rather because the Iraqis will demand it.

"I used to think that Americans were impatient," Conway continued, "but we don't hold a candle to the Iraqis. We are seen as infidels and nonbelievers and, further, most Iraqis now consider us occupiers. They will expect us to provide regional security for a long time, because we have destroyed their army. But they will be willing to accept risk as regards internal security, in exchange for a reduced coalition presence. I think our strategic planners have got it right."

A Pentagon civilian echoes Conway's judgment: "The commanders have told us consistently that they want fewer American troops, not more. Having more troops means more targets, more force protection, more occupiers. Having fewer Americans lets Iraqis take on the duties themselves."

Doing more with less is the overwhelming lesson of Afghanistan, Rumsfeld constantly reminds aides. The performance of the several thousand newly trained Iraqi soldiers who accompanied the division-size Marine force into Fallujah is the other essential part of the demonstration effect there, as Rumsfeld hinted in a Pentagon news conference on Monday.

It was his first briefing for Defense Department reporters since Sept. 7. Asked about his absence from the podium, Rumsfeld said Bush had asked him and Secretary of State Colin Powell to keep low profiles during the campaign.

That enabled the White House to practice tighter damage control on foreign and defense policy. But such caution also granted the insurgents time to prepare. The costs this may have involved will only now become clear as the key battles for the Sunni heartland begin in earnest.