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

Icann and Foxfyre, PLEASE stop with the Schiavo discussion here. I am sick to death of reading about it and I see no reason for it to permeate every thread.

... Besides an inference that I am hung up WMD would take more than one post.

so tunneled vision when it comes to AQ and Iraq before the war

President Bush announced to the nation ,Tuesday night, 9/11/2001,and to the nation, to Congress and to the rest of the world, Thursday night, 9/20/2001, that our war was not only with the terrorists who have declared war on us, it is also with those governments that “harbor” or “support” terrorists.

At that time there were terrorist training bases in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The terrorist training bases in Iraq were re-established in 2001 after the Kurds had defeated them a couple of years earlier.

We invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 without obtaining UN approval and removed Afghanistan's tyrannical government, because that government refused to attempt to remove the terrorist bases from Afghanistan.

We invaded Iraq in March 2003 without obtaining UN approval and removed Iraq's tyrannical government, because that government in Iraq refused to attempt to remove the terrorist bases from Iraq.

We are attempting to secure a democratic government of the Afghanistanis own design in Afghanistan primarily because we believe such a government is less likely to permit the re-establishment of terrorist bases there.

We are attempting to secure a democratic government of the Iraqis own design in Iraq primarily because we believe such a government is less likely to permit the re-establishent of terrorist bases there.

I think that only after that enormously difficult work is completed successfully, should we consider invasion and removal of any other tyrannical governments that refuse to attempt to remove terrorist bases from their countries.

... you are so tunneled vision when it comes to AQ and Iraq before the war....

... I understand you disagree and I am willing and hoping to let it go at that.

Besides, I am sick of reading about it.

revel wrote:

... I understand you disagree and I am willing and hoping to let it go at that.

Just for the record:

1. I have repeatedly agreed that "on the whole the main points [made by the Bush administration] in the lead up to the war was WMD".

2. I have repeatedly agreed that the "area" in Iraq containing the AQ bases "was out of Saddam's control."

3. I have repeatedly agreed that "there were other places in the world where there were stronger ties to AQ at the time of the attack."

4. I have repeatedly agreed there was little or no evidence that Saddam's regime participated in the AQ 9/11 attacks in any manner.

I have repeatedly stated (I did that again in my last post to you) why I nevertheless disagree with you and think that the AQ based in Iraq were a significant growing threat to the US and had to be removed from Iraq by the US, and why Saddam's regime had to also be removed from Iraq by the US.

I disagree that your foregoing points 1, 2, 3, plus my point 4 are relevant to why the AQ based in Iraq were a significant growing threat to the US and had to be removed by the US, and why Saddam's regime had to also be removed by the US.

... Wilmshurt resigned condemning the invasion as "a criminal act of aggression".

Now the law did not change. What caused Goldsmith to change his mind? We have a right to know, and Goldsmith himself has a right to tell us. But he's not allowed to say. Shame that, we could have sorted out a little mystery. Of course nothing important at stake, just the decision between war and peace.

Whatever law it is, please post a link to it, or better yet post the relevant sections of that law.

Try the BBC for all your questions, revel :wink:

Democracy's nasty surprises

Geoffrey Wheatcroft International Herald Tribune
Friday, March 25, 2005


Change in the Mideast I

BATH, England Nearly 73 years ago one of the greatest democracies on earth held a general election under universal suffrage. None of several parties won an absolute majority, but one was the clear winner, doubling its vote to 37.4 percent to become the largest group in Parliament.

That autumn, President Herbert Hoover was up for re-election and the Republican convention managers might perhaps have produced a satisfied voter from that faraway country, in the way a grateful Iraqi was flourished in Washington recently by the Bush administration. Not surprisingly, they didn't do so. The country was of course Germany, and the triumphant party was the National Socialists, led by Hitler.

That 1932 election showed that democracy often raises as many problems as it answers, a lesson we may soon learn again in the Middle East. Western enthusiasm for what Tony Blair calls "a ripple of change" toward democracy there rests on two assumptions: in particular that a democratic Middle East will prove peaceable and friendly to America, and in general that democratic government is benevolent. Both assumptions deserve closer inspection.

To say that democracy will always defeat tyranny is much too simple. Sometimes it can lead to it. When the colonial powers departed Africa in the 1950s and 60s, they left behind model constitutional arrangements, regular elections, bicameral legislatures, even replicas of the speaker's mace from the House of Commons.

And all too often the outcome was, in the sarcastic phrase, "one man, one vote, one time." When the British wanted to extricate themselves from the last of these territories, then called Rhodesia, they held a national election. It was won by Robert Mugabe, with results that have been seen ever since.

Before the Iraq war even began, a debating trick was much used by neoconservatives. If you don't want to bring democracy to the Middle East, you must be a racist who thinks that Arabs are congenitally unfit for self-government. That was answered by Amitai Etzioni: There is of course no genetic defect that makes any people unsuited for democracy. But it is not something that can be learned overnight, or acquired like membership of a club; it is a system that evolved over centuries of sometimes violent struggle.

When it did take root, it was in countries that were already stable, reasonably prosperous and largely homogeneous, unlike Iraq and those failed African states. If that has a ring of Eurocentric condescension, look at Northern Ireland. There, democracy has not softened communal divisions but notably hardened them. Not long ago, the largest party on the Protestant loyalist side was the Ulster Unionists, and on the Catholic nationalist side the peaceable Social Democratic and Labor Party.

Since the 1998 Belfast Agreement, and in a succession of free elections, those moderate Unionists have been supplanted by the more intransigent Democratic Unionist Party, while the Social Democrats have has been swamped by Sinn Fein, the political front of the terrorist Irish Republican Army.

Behind all this is a deeper problem. Democracy is implicitly founded on the belief that electorates will act responsibly and rationally. Nations can in the end acquire the habits of political responsibility, it's true, as the Germans have done in the second half of the 20th century. But then to look back at the first half is a reminder that they learned the hard way.

It has been said that it is a denial of the whole experience of the past century to suppose that men will reject their passions in favor of their interests. If men or women always followed a rational political course, would so many Germans have voted for Hitler in 1932? Or would have more than a third of Czech voters voted Communist in the free elections of 1946, making the takeover less than two years later much easier?

All this is far from academic today. Assuming the sincerity of the ideological proponents of the Iraq war, they must have believed that bringing democracy to the Middle East would lead people there to vote for parties that are sensible, moderate and pro-American. It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that the more democratic Iraq might become, the more strongly nationalist or Islamist, or both, it might be - and the more bitterly hostile to America as well as Israel.

No doubt democracy is what Churchill called it, the worst system except for all the rest, and it often has nasty surprises up its sleeve. We may yet see some alarming leaders emerge in the Middle East, for all that they are "chosen by Parliament and confirmed by democracy" - the phrase one cynical Nazi used to describe the way his führer came to power soon after that election in 1932.

(Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author of "The Strange Death of Tory England.'')

well if you're all getting tired, try this

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=623124


Meanwhile the attorney general is coming under intense pressure here. Elizabeth Wilmshurt's resignation letter is absolutely damning. The censored paragraphs now revealed make it abundantly clear that Peter Goldsmith's view was the war was illegal without a second resolution specifically authorising force. He held that view from spring 2002 for a year. On March 7 2003 he told Blair that the invasion was of doubtful legality and to expect legal challenge in the courts. By March 17 2003 he made it clear by way of a parliamentary reply that the war was legal without a second resolution. He went to cabinet an said the same there.

Wilmshurt resigned condemning the invasion as "a criminal act of aggression".

Now the law did not change. What caused Goldsmith to change his mind? We have a right to know, and Goldsmith himself has a right to tell us. But he's not allowed to say. Shame that, we could have sorted out a little mystery. Of course nothing important at stake, just the decision between war and peace.