Asherman wrote:I think it will come down finally to the question, who do you believe? Do you believe Saddam, or do you believe the President of the United States? Saddam, or the reporters embedded in Allied fighting units? Saddam, or the Allied Military command? Saddam, or the kid next door who is serving in the 1st Infantry? Whose value system is more trustworthy, the values system of the American and British, or value system of Saddam Hussein?
I'm sure - as you pointed out in your again well-written response, Asherman - we will be able to judge about this later, much later perhaps.
Quote:"We can't understand why people are lying about what happened. It must be a mistake. It's important to us that people know the truth, that people know what really happened."
This was said by the the sister of Sapper Luke Allsopp, 24, from Dagenham, Essex, who was last seen on Sunday when he and Staff Sergeant Simon Cullingworth, 36, were caught up in enemy fire near Al Zubayr, 15 miles outside the second city of Basra. Prime Minister Tony Blair's official spokesman insisted the premier had been right to say the two Royal Engineer bomb disposal experts had been executed.
But Sapper Allsopp's sister Nina, 29, and Iraqi authorities said the claims were "lies". She told the Daily Mirror that senior officers from her brother's barracks, in Wimbish, Essex, informed the family he had been killed instantly in battle.
`Our Luke wasn't executed'
Truth hurts. But they'll still somehow put a spin on it.
Worrisome news ... both media and "other sources" indicate Iraqi activity which leads to the conclusion preparations are underway to facilitate the deployment of some sort of noxious aerosols. This could be real serious. I sincerely hope it is just another hysterical rumor.
The next day or so will see lots of reports of the "Its all gone to hell ... we underestimated" nature.
The reality is that such is merely the perception of reporters with little knowledge of how war is fought. Each "Embed" sees a tiny slice. Troops grouse and gripe, and front line troops grouse and gripe heartily about the rear echelon. There is never enough fuel, or food, or toilet paper ... invariably do to "Screwed up resupply". If you listen to the troops. Who else is the Embed going to listen too? And of course, troops being what they are, every firefight is The Battle of The Bulge, and the boys telling the stories are the heroes who saved the day. Something the media probably will miss is that a shift in the strategy is taking place ... a planned shift, albeit altered to fit contingencies which have been encountered once the boots hit the dirt. The West and The North are going to become very much more imnportant over the next 96 hours. There is not a heavy lift air transport to be had anywhere else at the moment ... lots of stuff is being flown to lots of places. The March is over. The assembly is under way. To my thinking, the Big Punch is not far off at all ... and I suspect it will blindside Saddam. The Shock and Awe concept is going to be explained most thoroughly to the Iraqi footsoldier real soon.
Oh, and on Shock and Awe ... those disappointed by what TV portrayed of the concept would be wise to consider that Baghdad has received a rather small percentage of the munitions so far expended in the effort. Many times the tonnage dumped on Baghdad has been flung at targets not covered by network cameras or embedded reporters.
timber, once again good points. i agree.
Dear Timber,
I was interested to watch the Camp David press conference live at about 1am this morning (Western Australian (base of the SAS btw) time).
I thought Blair came across as being rather insipid and Bush ... well I guess he was calling the shots. I think the US press are scared to ask Bush any hard hitting questions lest they suffer the fate of Al Jazeera in Wall Street.
Blair quoted the statistic that 400,000 Iraqi children have died over the last ten years as an example of Saddam's cruel regime. The reason these children have been dying is because of an abject lack of medical supplies thanks to US economic sanctions.
Have you been taking the brown acid Timber? Do you really believe all this narrow minded bollocks which you spew out. Have a look at yourself in the mirror.....well maybe don't do that...have another Big mac and fires and Coke instead.
Their is a world outside the US and many of that world don't like you.
On a more serious note the AFL season starts today and I'm praying to my Totem of the Red Kangaroo tribe that Fremantle makes the finals.
<Had a former Fremantle player coach our team for a couple of games in high school. >
Really? Who was it...Gerard Neesham?
Asherman,
This is war and the Iraqi have the right to defend themselves with all means. There are no rules of engangement when your country is attacked. Or do you think the US would stick to those rules when a foreign army besieged Washington?
Thanks for that link, PDiddie!
What will be said when the 'embeded' press corp get left at the gates of the city because is too 'dangerous' for them to proceed?
Gelisgesti wrote:What will be said when the 'embeded' press corp get left at the gates of the city because is too 'dangerous' for them to proceed?
Some people here call me "The Al-Jazeera man". But you have to admit those journalists got a lot of nerve. They go to places and cities where no other journalists dare to go. They give us a different view on this conflict.
Not a question of their bravery .... rather a need to introduce evidence without questions of veracity. ie: aluminum tubes
timber, you wrote
Quote:I believe this will take at most a few weeks yet, likely just two or three, but I see no reason to suspect essential military resolution will require "months". The War goes far less unwell than many pundits postulate. The next day or so will see lots of reports of the "Its all gone to hell ... we underestimated" nature.
But Bush himself is now talking about months.
Rumsfeld says US forces may not take Baghdad but lay seige to it.
Richard Perle has resigned.
As I've said many times, the whole strategy of a quick relatively bloodless regime change was predicated on Perle's (and others) belief that "No one supports Saddam, and no-one is prepared to die for him". Only last Friday Perle was talking about the war lasting just a few days.
That type of thinking has led the US administration into believing the liberation of Iraq could proceed with limited precision air strikes and a rapid advance of armour to take the major cities. "Innergraded sinnergeez" prevailed.
The reality (surprise surprise) has turned out differently. Coalition forces now face the worst situation. They have not toppled Saddam. The people, if not fighting for Saddam, are fighting for their country against a foreign invader. (Was this really so hard to forsee?)
There are too few coalition troops deployed, and even if we had overwhelming numbers, I don't believe the political will is there to take Baghdad street by street, building by building.
This war is already a disaster.
I can't see a way out except a negotiated settlement (i.e. defeat for the coalition), or a military victory which will hand over the moral high ground to Saddam (living or dead) forevermore.
If Perle and his neo conservative think-tankists were advising in Baghdad instead of Washington, they would be swinging from lamposts by now.
The United States And Britain Are Heading For Disaster
Patrick Seale Al-Hayat 2003/03/28
Whatever the military outcome of the 'battle for Baghdad', politically and morally the United States and Britain have already lost the war. Far from welcoming the Western troops with flowers, surrendering, or fleeing the country as refugees, the Iraqis are putting up ferocious resistance.
Thousands of Iraqis working in Jordan and elsewhere are rushing home to join the fight. Three million light weapons have been distributed to the population. Soldiers, militiamen, fedayeen, ordinary citizens - a nation in arms - have joined forces in a brave if unequal struggle, which has won the admiration of anti-war protesters from Sydney to Seoul to Sanaa.
Whatever the final outcome, the Iraqis have won their proud place in Arab hearts and minds.
At the same time, Operation Iraqi Freedom has been exposed as a gruesome travesty. An old-fashioned colonial war, built on lies, greed and geopolitical fantasies, it has nothing to do with 'disarming' Iraq or 'liberating' the Iraqi people. Iraq is a threat to no one. No connection has been found between Iraq and the terrorist attacks of September 11, and no evidence has been provided that Iraq has continued to manufacture chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and might pass them on to terrorist groups. All this is malicious propaganda to mask the real war aims which are what they have been since 1991: to affirm America's global supremacy in a strategically vital, oil-rich part of the world, and to protect Israel's regional supremacy and its monopoly of weapons of mass destruction.
The vision of the main Washington war-mongers, such as Paul Wolfowitz, US deputy defense secretary, and Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board, with their cohorts in Zionist and right-wing think-tanks, has proved a self-serving mirage. No 'explosion of joy' has greeted the invasion, such as Wolfowitz continues to predict. The political map of the region is not about to be redrawn to suit American and Israeli interests. The capture of Baghdad will not be followed by 'regime change' in Iran and Syria. A defeated and grateful Iraq will not embrace American-style 'democracy' or readily sign a peace treaty with Israel. Instead, by inciting the United States to engage in a criminal adventure, these men have stirred up boundless hatred, which will plague the United States and its citizens for years to come. A day will come when a Congressional committee investigates how and by whom the ill-fated decision to go to war against Iraq was taken.
Long despised and dismissed as irrelevant, the Arab 'street' has awakened and, in increasingly violent demonstrations, is expressing its utter revulsion at American bullying. Iraqi resistance has in fact empowered the Arab masses in a way not seen since the passions stirred by the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser in the nineteen fifties and sixties.
Losing the war and losing the peace
The rift is dangerously wide between the governments of American client states in the Gulf, most notably Kuwait, and the broad current of Islamist and Arab nationalist opinion throughout the region. Gulf states may argue that they have had no choice but to host American troops because of military treaties signed with the US, but this sounds hollow in view of Turkey's principled stand despite its even more complex commitments to the US and NATO. If the war ends inconclusively, or subsides into guerrilla skirmishes, as well it might, the backlash against some of the ruling families in the Gulf could be violent. Kuwait should long since have made its peace with Iraq and consigned to history the 1990 invasion, for which the Iraqi people have paid so terrible a price. Whatever Iraqi regime emerges from this war will not easily forgive Kuwait its implacable revenge-seeking. In turn, the governments of Jordan and Egypt, torn between dependence on the United States and the explosive anti-American and anti-war sentiments of their populations, are also beginning to feel the heat. As was widely predicted, the fall-out from this war is likely to shake the region for a long while to come.
Meanwhile, on the battlefield, American and British troops, misled by their political masters, are having to face the nightmare of urban guerrilla warfare for which they have been neither trained nor equipped. Their supply convoys and the flanks of their armoured and infantry columns are being harassed by hit-and-run raids. Iraqi cities may become their death traps. They are responding with heavy, increasingly indiscriminate, air bombardment, as well as artillery and tank fire against civilian targets, further alienating a population already enraged by twelve years of cruel and crippling sanctions. Iraqi casualties, both military and civilian, are mounting rapidly. Hundreds, possibly thousands, have already been killed and wounded in battles at Umm Qasr, al-Nassiriyah, Najaf and many other places. The humanitarian crisis in Iraq's southern city of Basra, where two million people face acute food and water shortages, is putting great political pressure on Washington and London to do something to relieve it. Aid agencies are anxious to help, but they do not want to be tainted by association with American and British armies.
As forces gather for the assault on Baghdad, the key question facing the planners is whether the city can be taken at an acceptable cost in American and British lives.
Having lost the war politically, the US and Britain are also losing the peace. No one can seriously envisage Iraq being ruled by a United States military commander or by the rag-tag bunch of Iraqi exiles funded and cultivated by right-wing, often pro-Israeli, Washington hawks. American military occupation, if it comes to that, will be no picnic. Post-war Iraq will not be a safe place for Americans or Britons, whether soldiers or administrators, or their Iraqi collaborators. Nor will it be a safe place for American contractors and other fortune-hunters who, like vultures as Iraqis die, are already bidding for contracts to be paid for out of Iraqi oil revenues, and are hoping to divide the spoils of reconstruction with their cronies in the American government.
Tony Blair's catastrophic mistake
In the general political debacle, the saddest sight of all is Tony Blair, British prime minister, and his foreign secretary Jack Straw, scuttling for cover. Too late, they are beginning to utter distinctly European views, at odds with those of their hard-nosed American allies. The Washington hawks now say the UN is politically irrelevant to the resolution of the Iraqi crisis and needs radical reform, like stripping France of its seat as a permanent member of the Security Council! Blair, in contrast, says the United Nations must have a central role in a post-war Iraq. On his brief visit to the United States this week, he even made a detour via New York to call on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. But if Blair is suddenly so keen on the UN, why did he recklessly go to war without UN authorization? Now that things are beginning to go wrong, he is evidently hoping to recover some international legitimacy.
The big divide between Europe and America has to do with Israel and Palestine. Jack Straw has even made a startling confession. The West, he says, has been guilty of double standards! He feels 'angry and upset' at the plight of the Palestinians and also at the terror inflicted on the Israelis. Britain, he told the BBC, is 'one hundred percent committed' to the establishment of a viable Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem, based on Security Council Resolution 242, the 1967 borders, the end of Jewish settlements, and a solution of the refugee problem. These are fine words. But if he and his master Tony Blair are committed to such a two-state solution, why have they allied themselves in war with the American friends of Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon who is totally opposed to such a solution? Why over the past two years have they tolerated Sharon's massacre of Palestinians, his wholesale destruction of every vestige of Palestinian statehood, his targeted murders, house demolitions, settlement building, by-pass roads, closures, curfews and the rest of it? Why have there been no British sanctions against Israel to match the criminally punitive sanctions against Iraq that Britain helped the US keep in place?
Appointing himself an international statesman, Blair has sought to act as a transatlantic bridge between Europe and America. He believes it a grave danger if Europe were to constitute a rival pole to the United States, a development that most sensible people would see as a necessary check on the wild men in Washington and a major contribution to a less dangerous world. But Blair's 'bridge' has collapsed, along with Iraq's buildings. It is the gravest defeat for British diplomacy in living memory. He would do best to resign and let a more reasonable successor restore Britain's shattered ties with Europe as well as the authority of the United Nations.
©2003 Media Communications Group
frolic, how do you get Al-Jazeera in English? Or do you read Arabic? I have read that an English version is in the works but not available yet.
Kara, true enough ... While I agreed with the gist of the piece I felt the same as you .... still I would have been wrong to rewrite it.
Our government however has become separate from the Bush party.
Who speaks for America?
