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

Yeah, I was right.

But, you must remember: you cannot fight beliefs with facts. It's like hitting a pillow with a baseball bat.

I predict a post with lots of words like infer and reasonable and logical coming from Ican any minute now, with plenty of formatting in there for emphasis...

Bush staunchly believed there was an Iraq-bin Laden connection, and fabricated facts to support his hypothesis

Ex post facto justifications were expected, but they are hardly acceptable.

Bush declared war based on loose beliefs, not hard facts...and has done little or nothing to justify his misheld beliefs, or his misrepresentation of facts ... hit him with a bat

It is unavoidable, but often tiresome and redundant, to pit beliefs against facts. ... Ex post facto justifications were expected, but they are hardly acceptable.

... But where to find that consensus leader?

Many in Washington considered Amad Chalabi a likely choice. Chalabi had risen to prominence after Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. This legislation declared that it would be the "policy of the United States to seek to remove the Saddam Hussein regime from power in Iraq and to replace it with a democratic government." The Act directed the President to designate one or more suitable Iraq opposition organizations to receive assistance. Chalabi's umbrella Iraqi National Congress, led mainly by anti-Saddam exiles, was designated such a group.

I'm currently reading Franks' book. It should probably be required reading for anyone posting to message boards on the subject of Iraq.

Toronto
As a young Canadian Muslim who has called for reform in Islam, I've been
traveling throughout North America and Europe over the past year. Last
week, I toured France and Spain. God help me.


I didn't expect a warm reception from fellow Muslims. But now, I'm also not
sure that liberal Muslims like me fit comfortably in a secular European
crowd. I say this even after the murder of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch
filmmaker, who police officials say was shot and stabbed by a Muslim
extremist. Mr. van Gogh had exercised his right to criticize Islam - a
right that I, as a modern Muslim, defend unequivocally.


What then gives me the sense that even modern Muslims can't be modern
enough for Western Europe? It's precisely that, from Amsterdam to Barcelona
to Paris to Berlin, people incredulously ask me one type of question that
I'm never asked in the United States and Canada: Why does an
independent-minded woman care about God? Why do you need religion at all?


I'll answer in a moment. To get there, allow me to observe key differences
between the debate over Islam in Western Europe and North America. In
Western Europe, the entry point for this debate is the hijab - the
headscarf that many Muslim women wear as a signal of modesty. By contrast,
the entry point in North America is terrorism.


Some might say that difference is understandable. After all, Sept. 11
happened on American soil. But March 11 happened on European ground, yet
the hijab remains the starting point for Europeans. Meanwhile, it makes
barely a ripple in North America.


This difference speaks to a larger gulf in attitudes toward religion. To a
lot of Europeans, still steeped in memories of the Catholic Church's
intellectual repression, religion is an irrational force. So women who
cover themselves are foolish at best and dangerous otherwise.


Not so in North America. Because it has long been a society of immigrants
seeking religious tolerance, religion itself is not seen as irrational -
even if what some people do with it might be, as in the case of terrorism.
Which means Muslims in North America tend to be judged less by what we wear
than by what we do - or don't do, like speaking out against Islamist
violence.


But there's something else going on. The mass immigration of Muslims is
bringing faith back into the public realm and creating a post-Enlightenment
modernity for Western Europe. This return of religion threatens secular
humanism, the orthodoxy that has prevailed since the French Revolution.
Paradoxically, because many Western Europeans feel that they're losing
Enlightenment values amid the flood of "people of faith," they wind up
sympathizing with those in the Muslim world who resent imported values that
challenge their own. Both groups are identity protectionists.


We see such protectionism playing out in the debate about whether Turkey
may join the European Union. Reflecting a sizable segment of public
opinion, European Union commissioners have argued that Turkey is too
"oriental." And let us stay that way, proclaim some Muslim puritans who
fear the promiscuity of pluralistic values. But is Turkey all that
different from Europe?


It's a longtime member of NATO. Its so-called Islamist government has
updated the country's human rights statutes to conform to the standards of
the European Union. It's home to an astonishingly free press. Recently, a
left-wing newspaper questioned the Koran's origins, a right-wing newspaper
wrote about gays and lesbians lobbying for sexual orientation to be
included in anti-discrimination laws, and a centrist newspaper
editorialized that the education system should be reformed to promote
diversity.


As one young Turk told me, "If Western values are tolerance, democracy,
justice, equality and freedom, then I live in a Western country: Turkey."
Try explaining that to those Europeans who want to impose their baggage
from the Vatican onto Muslim immigrants. Their secularism can be zealous,
missionary - dare I say it, religious.


Which brings me back to the question of why I, an independent-minded woman,
bother with Islam. Religion supplies a set of values, including discipline,
that serve as a counterweight to the materialism of life in the West. I
could have become a runaway materialist, a robotic mall rat who resorts to
retail therapy in pursuit of fulfillment. I didn't. That's because religion
introduces competing claims. It injects a tension that compels me to think
and allows me to avoid fundamentalisms of my own.


Islam today has deep flaws, and I know saying so makes me a blasphemer in
the eyes of countless Muslims. C'est la vie. If they move beyond emotion,
they'll come to appreciate that for the rationalists among us, religion can
be a godsend.

Bush is bat food because he didn't supply the correct justifications ahead of time.

...The basic premise of the war was WMD and a connection with al-Qaeda. Period.

But what I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder. Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi an associate and collaborator of Usama bin Laden and his al-Qaida lieutenants.

Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. This legislation declared that it would be the "policy of the United States to seek to remove the Saddam Hussein regime from power in Iraq and to replace it with a democratic government."

..."Liberating" the Iraqi people from a dictator was not the initial premise, it was the learned and resulting one.

...Had Bush simply said that his objective was to remove Hussein because he was a bad man...the American people would have understood that, but he wold not have had the same support.

...Conveying to Americans that he posed an imminent threat to the security of the US, that he possessed and was willing to use his many tons of bio. and chem. weapons, instilled fear of him and necessitated his removal. Bush drummed up support based on faulty inteligence, false premises and fabricated imagery. ...

Yeah, I was right.

Cycloptichorn

... but from my understanding, the war in Iraq began before it even started...

... It has become so cliche to say that you can't you can't bring about peaceful resolve with violent means, but I would hope that the US, the beacon of freedom and democracy, in all it's wealth and infinite wisdom, could have formulated a resolution that would have involved the UN, and perhaps took advantage of the alliances the US once[i/] had before it unitilaterally acted.

... all I know is that something is not adding up, and I am not convinced Bush is the altruistic being the right believes him to be. But if he is, I am willing to accept it. So far, that's a long way to go. Things just don't add up.

What are we talking about here? One guy in all of Iraq and he being in Kurdistan that is out of the control of Saddam Hussien as being the reason that makes Iraq a just war even though their stated reasons turned out to be false?

My point with my simplistic question was that there are a lot of Islamic militants that must get at least as much if not more "safe habor" all over the world because it is a safe bet that we know where they are, we have told the leaders where they are at, but they are still there. Yet we are not (I hope not) going after all those countries.

People keep going on and on about OFFS; what I wonder is if it is now justifiable for us to have went to war when we did since the reason that Germany and France and Russia didn't go along with us was because they were trade offs with saddam Hussien and they didn't want to mess that up, are we now going to go after Germany, Russia and France since they were partners with Saddam Hussien so in effect were haboring Saddam Hussien who is a terrorist?

If the people would only realize that "only good men start wars." Only good men bend around laws that are made to protect the innocent from a nameless metaphor of evil. The faceless become faceless by blending together in a declaration of 'us or them' 'for us or against us , never defining either ..... then shape shift into whichever the moment requires to enable the mantle of 'we' .....

Quote:

If the people would only realize that "only good men start wars." Only good men bend around laws that are made to protect the innocent from a nameless metaphor of evil. The faceless become faceless by blending together in a declaration of 'us or them' 'for us or against us , never defining either ..... then shape shift into whichever the moment requires to enable the mantle of 'we' .....

D, I know.