I want the US to lose the war in Iraq

You're worried about unintended consequences now? Why didn't you voice similar concerns about the unintended consequences of a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq?


And yet you are nevertheless unable to provide it.

......only because you refuse to accept a logical, compelling answer. You not only are not persuasive..............you are more polarizing because of your refusal to accept valid criticism of your thesis. Take your case to the UN where you will find many who are willing to accept any criticism of the US even if unfounded and indefensible

It surely does seem that a great many people who are to be numbered among the supporters of the current administration are obsessed with the United Nations. What a marvelously convenient, all-purpose bogey-man.

Yeah, Set - funny how it seems some people gotta have one of those (bogey man).

I'd accept it if I saw it.

I asked you if you thought majorities were always right. In response, you stated that majorities were right "enough." Apart from the fact that I have no idea what that means, that simply did not address my question. But if you'd like to take another shot at answering my question, I'd be happy to consider it.


Again, I am more than happy to consider valid criticism of my thesis. Do you have any to offer?

Hey Boss, as the retired sailor said, long time, no sea . . . good to see you around . . .

Iraq is a quagmire. Two years + after the invasion very little reconstruction is completed. Terrorism is a daily event. Oil production is down. Several months after elections, they still have no working government. And when its formed a significant segment of the population will never accept its legitimacy. The Iraqi army is being re formed to take on the insurgents. In the past the army has provided the power base for a "strong man" to rule the country...

Joe says he wants the US to lose. I don't. I want USUK to build Iraq into the peaceful democratic western-leaning but Muslim state that we set out to create. But we are not achieving this.

This is my big argument. Not so much that we invaded, but having done so we have ****ed it up.

I see nothing to argue with in that, Steve. However, to solve a problem, it is first necessary to acknowledge that there is a problem, and then to define the problem so as to provide the best solution.

These jokers will not even acknowledge that there is a problem.

the guy in the cool aviator shades wrote

Can't talk for joe, but as for myself I do have a somewhat similar notion...that when a pig-tailed girl on the far side of the moon is agressively running the hurdles it causes Ann Coulter to speak.

I really truly do not understand American behaviour over Iraq. I've said I dont want USUK to lose, in that I want us to create a modern free democratic Muslim Iraq which is pro west and at peace.

And this is how the Americans go about it.

This from a subscription piece in today's Independent on Sunday which I have very kindly typed out ...

AMERICA'S SHAME TWO YEARS ON FROM 'MISSION ACCOMPLISHED'

by Robert Fisk

Two years after 'Mission Accomplished' whatever moral stature the United States could claim at the end of its invasion o fIraq has long ago been squandered in the torture and abuse and deaths at Abu Ghraib. That the symbol of Saddam Hussein's brutality should have been turned by his own enemies into the symbol of their own brutality is a singularly ironic epitaph for the whole Iraqi adventure.
But this is not only about Abu Ghraib. There are clear and proven connections now between the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the cruelty at the Americans' Bagram prison in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Curiously General Janis Karpinski the only senior US officer facing charges over Abu Ghraib, admitted to me a year earlier when I visited the prison that she had been at Guantanano Bay, but that at Abu Ghraib she was not permitted to attend interrogations- which seems very odd.
A vast quantity of evidence has now been built up on the system which the Americans have created for mistreating and torturing prisoners. I have interviewed a Palestinian who gave me compelling evidence of anal rape with wooden poles at Bagram- by Americans not by Afghans. Many of the stories now coming out of Guantanamo- the sexual humiliation of Muslim prisoners, their shackling to seats in which they defecate and urinate, the use of pornography to make Muslim prisoners feel impure, the female interrogators who wear little clothing (or in one case pretended to smear menstrual blood on a prisoner's face) are incresingly proved true. Iraqis whom I have questioned at great length over many hours, speak with candour of terrifying beatings from military and civilian interrogators, not just in Abu Ghraib but in US bases elsewhere in Iraq.
At the American camp outside fallujah, prisoners are beaten with full plastic water bottles which break cutting the skin. At Abu Ghraib prison dogs have been used to frighten and to bite prisoners.
How did this culture of filth start in America's 'war on terror'?...

...With the insurgency growing ever more vicious and uncontrollable, the emptiness of Mr Bush's silly boast is plain. The real mission, it seems was to institutionalise the cruely of Western armies, staining us forever with the depravity of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and Bagram - not to mention the secret prisons which even the Red Cross cannot visit and wherein who knows what vileness is conducted. What, I wonder is our next "mission"?

Your taking a Robert Fisk article seriously?

I thought everyone understood what a hack he was by now.

Damn. If I left out Fisk's by-line McG would have read it and believed it ....from me.

I have no knowledge of Robert Fisk, but the article posted above was a rather sophomoric and hysterical compilation of unfounded and rather dramatic accusations, quite completely devoid of verifiable facts, Not the sort of stuff a discerning reader takes seriously.

From Znet

Robert Fisk is an internationally recognized journalist for the Independent of London. His in depth reports on the middle east have provided a much needed contrast to official doctrine and have empowered activists all over the world. He is a regular contributor to the ZNet as well as the Nation and other publications.

--------------------------------------------------

ok I suppose you'll dismiss that reference because "activists" have been empowered!

------------------------------------------

from reprint of Independent article

"Future generations will struggle to escape the legacy of the disaster in Iraq


by Robert Fisk
Independent, Oct 11, 2004

(Robert Fisk is Britain's most highly decorated foreign correspondent. Currently the Beirut correspondent for the London Independent, Fisk has covered the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the U.S. attack on Afghanistan, and the conflict in Algeria. He is also the author of Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (Atheneum, 1990).)

article begins

I am writing a book about our need to escape from history - or rather about our inability to escape the effects of the decisions taken by our fathers and grandfathers. My father was a soldier in the First World War or, as it says on the back of his campaign medal, "The Great War for Civilisation" - which is the title I've chosen for my book. In the space of just 17 months after my father's war ended, the victors had drawn the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent all my professional life watching the people inside those borders burn... article continues

Fisk is no sophomore George. And when he says

"Iraqis whom I have questioned at great length over many hours, speak with candour of terrifying beatings from military and civilian interrogators, not just in Abu Ghraib but in US bases elsewhere in Iraq."

I for one (reluctantly) believe him.

It might perhaps help you to understand O'George's position, Steve, if you will note his reference to "a discerning reader," which is to say, one of the same political conviction as he cherishes.

Can we trust Robert Fisk's reporting of complex events in the Middle East? Even his most devoted supporters might question Fisk's reliability after reading this:

Last Sunday, I was invited to talk on Irish television's TV3 lunchtime programme on Iraq and President Bush's support for Sharon's new wall on the West Bank. Towards the end of the programme, Tom Cooney, a law lecturer at University College, Dublin, suddenly claimed that I had called an Israeli army unit a "rabble" (absolutely correct - they are) and that I reported they had committed a massacre in Jenin in 2002.

I did not say they committed a massacre. But I should have. A subsequent investigation showed that Israeli troops had knowingly shot down innocent civilians, killed a female nurse and driven a vehicle over a paraplegic in a wheelchair. "Blood libel!" Cooney screamed.

Check the tape and you'll discover that Fisk can't even report his own television appearances accurately. Cooney never screams -- and it is Fisk, rather than Cooney, who uses the term "rabble". Fisk claims not to have accused the Israeli army of committing a massacre; he actually went further, writing that the Israeli army "has not yet finished filling the mass graves of Jenin".

Fisk lies.

source

I'm no more immune from that than are Setanta. However the article in question was indeed rather sophomoric and - even on second reading - a bit hysterical and utterly devoid of verifiable fact. If he is the leading reporter in Britain, I fear for them. (all while recognizing that our standard in that overrated 'profession' isn't much better.).

A page down the site from where McGentrix cut and pasted his last post i found this

...which might be acceptable on that site, but not on a2k so I have had to censor certain words but you will still get the meaning

------------------------------------------------

I pray for the day that repulsive lump of dogsh1t joins Walter Duranty and Joseph Goebels in the hell prepared for the willing mouthpieces murderers and tyrants.

If only those Afghanis had beaten him to death, if only that security contracter the self-righteous little sh1t harassed outside the hotel in Bahgdad had flipped and put two in his head.

But no such luck, Pat Tillman lies in his grave and that c*cksucker Fisk will live to be a hundred and five. Get cancer, Fisk. Drive drunk, piss off some of your beloved swarthy locals, something, anything. Die you f*ck.

Posted by: Amos at April 25, 2004 at 03:42 AM

--------------------------------------------

Which reflects more on his critics than it does on Mr Fisk.

Just a quick note on Fisk/Israel etc...

If you keep up at all with the Israeli press, you'll find that anti-Likud or pro-Palestinian peace movement issues are covered far more extensively and openly there than they are in the US.

Nothing is covered in the US Press except tragedy, political assassination, Bush bashing and degradation of the US military.