The US, UN & Iraq II

Gee--everybody must have gone to the pub early today. Normally when I'm absent for 2 or 3 hrs there's a flurry of activity and it takes about an hour to catch up.

I know you can't wait for my latest prediction so here it is----now that we control the airport (and BTW it has been renamed the "Baghdad International" airport), our special forces teams are conducting raids on every Presidential Palace looking for the bunker that Saddam is cowering in. Even though we have construction plans for these (there are several , all constructed by German companies) bunkers he was able to keep secret the actual precise location. The tunnel from the airport should provide a lot of clues about the location of THE bunker because he would have an excape route from that rat hole to the airport. One of the first things we did was render the airport unusable for takeoff.

I've still got 3 days left on my original prediction of 20 days total before Saddam is flushed out---speaking of flushed out----that's the best way of flushing a rat out---pump the hole full of water.

BTW---it is speculated that the reason his vaunted army is doing so poorly----two Russian Generals have been advising his army---the same two Generals who advised him during and before the last Gulf war. Talk about slow learners.

It has also been reported that we have a large number of official records indicating that the Russians sold Saddam some anti-tank missiles that were developed after the sanctions were put in place.

Jay Leno reported that the French hurt themselves yesterday jumping on the USA bandwagon.

Chirac has his sword out ----he is placing the grip on the ground and is leaning over...............

Sean-paul is taking a day off to get married. www.agonist.org.

The war will continue, of course, but I will miss his running commentary.

Has he gone ;o)) Heh Heh Heh

blished on Wednesday, January 8, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
Why Does President Bush Want to Drop Bombs on Innocent Iraqis?
Transcript of White House Briefing - January 6, 2003


Ari Fleischer: And with that, I'm more than happy to take your questions. Helen.

Helen Thomas: At the earlier briefing, Ari, you said that the President deplored the taking of innocent lives. Does that apply to all innocent lives in the world? And I have a follow-up.

Ari Fleischer: I refer specifically to a horrible terrorist attack on Tel Aviv that killed scores and wounded hundreds. And the President, as he said in his statement yesterday, deplores in the strongest terms the taking of those lives and the wounding of those people, innocents in Israel.

Helen Thomas: My follow-up is, why does he want to drop bombs on innocent Iraqis?

Ari Fleischer: Helen, the question is how to protect Americans, and our allies and friends --

Helen Thomas: They're not attacking you.

Ari Fleischer: -- from a country --

Helen Thomas: Have they laid the glove on you or on the United States, the Iraqis, in 11 years?

Ari Fleischer: I guess you have forgotten about the Americans who were killed in the first Gulf War as a result of Saddam Hussein's aggression then.

Helen Thomas: Is this revenge, 11 years of revenge?

Ari Fleischer: Helen, I think you know very well that the President's position is that he wants to avert war, and that the President has asked the United Nations to go into Iraq to help with the purpose of averting war.

Helen Thomas: Would the President attack innocent Iraqi lives?

Ari Fleischer: The President wants to make certain that he can defend our country, defend our interests, defend the region, and make certain that American lives are not lost.

Helen Thomas: And he thinks they are a threat to us?

Ari Fleischer: There is no question that the President thinks that Iraq is a threat to the United States.

Helen Thomas: The Iraqi people?

Ari Fleischer: The Iraqi people are represented by their government. If there was regime change, the Iraqi --

Helen Thomas: So they will be vulnerable?

Ari Fleischer: Actually, the President has made it very clear that he has not dispute with the people of Iraq. That's why the American policy remains a policy of regime change. There is no question the people of Iraq --

Helen Thomas: That's a decision for them to make, isn't it? It's their country.

Ari Fleischer: Helen, if you think that the people of Iraq are in a position to dictate who their dictator is, I don't think that has been what history has shown.

Helen Thomas: I think many countries don't have -- people don't have the decision -- including us.

I agree with Craven. Just because I think Bush is a fratboy, dry drunk, born-with-a-silver-spoon in his garbled English speaking mouth, destructive, stupid, narrow, dim, backwards assed John Wayne wannabe,
...doesn't mean I think that perception necessarily is.

Here's a great story about the young lady who was rescued and the Iraqi lawyer who risked his life and walked 6 miles to first inform US force personnel and then went back to get more information. He walked a total of 24 miles for someone he didn't even know.

http://msnbc.com/news/895233.asp

Bush planned Iraq 'regime change' before becoming President
By Neil Mackay

A SECRET blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure 'regime change' even before he took power in January 2001.

The blueprint, uncovered by the Sunday Herald, for the creation of a 'global Pax Americana' was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice- president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), George W Bush's younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says: 'The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.'

The PNAC document supports a 'blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests'.

This 'American grand strategy' must be advanced for 'as far into the future as possible', the report says. It also calls for the US to 'fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars' as a 'core mission'.

The report describes American armed forces abroad as 'the cavalry on the new American frontier'. The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document written by Wolfowitz and Libby that said the US must 'discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role'.

The PNAC report also:

l refers to key allies such as the UK as 'the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership';

l describes peace-keeping missions as 'demanding American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations';

l reveals worries in the administration that Europe could rival the USA;

l says 'even should Saddam pass from the scene' bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently -- despite domestic opposition in the Gulf regimes to the stationing of US troops -- as 'Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has';

l spotlights China for 'regime change' saying 'it is time to increase the presence of American forces in southeast Asia'. This, it says, may lead to 'American and allied power providing the spur to the process of democratisation in China';

l calls for the creation of 'US Space Forces', to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent 'enemies' using the internet against the US;

l hints that, despite threatening war against Iraq for developing weapons of mass destruction, the US may consider developing biological weapons -- which the nation has banned -- in decades to come. It says: 'New methods of attack -- electronic, 'non-lethal', biological -- will be more widely available ... combat likely will take place in new dimensions, in space, cyberspace, and perhaps the world of microbes ... advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool';

l and pinpoints North Korea, Libya, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes and says their existence justifies the creation of a 'world-wide command-and-control system'.

Tam Dalyell, the Labour MP, father of the House of Commons and one of the leading rebel voices against war with Iraq, said: 'This is garbage from right-wing think-tanks stuffed with chicken-hawks -- men who have never seen the horror of war but are in love with the idea of war. Men like Cheney, who were draft-dodgers in the Vietnam war.

'This is a blueprint for US world domination -- a new world order of their making. These are the thought processes of fantasist Americans who want to control the world. I am appalled that a British Labour Prime Minister should have got into bed with a crew which has this moral standing.

Gelis, What kind of support do you have for this claim of ME domination, other than your post? c.i.

I'm digging .... alot of bits and pieces.... my two posts on page 286 ..... plus a gut feeling for what is more logical .... proof .... nada

CounterPunch

February 27, 2003
Hell-Bent for War
For Six Years, Rightwing Think Tanks Have Been Pushing an Invasion of Iraq

by JASON LEOPOLD


Never before in the history of the United States presidency has a think tank had such an impact on shaping U.S. foreign policy as the Project for the New American Century has on helping President George W. Bush set foreign policy goals for his Administration, particularly dictating exactly how Bush should deal with Iraq and its President, Saddam Hussein.

For the past six years, PNAC has lobbied former President Clinton and Bush heavily to initiate a war in Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power, claiming the country poses a serious threat to the U.S. and its allies because of its ability to develop weapons of mass destruction. Clinton rebuffed the advice by PNAC members during the last four years of his presidency, but Bush has virtually used, word for word, the written statements by PNAC members when he speaks publicly about Iraq crisis.

PNAC, which says its goal is to promote Americais foreign and defense policies, has been written about in dribs and drabs over the past year in the foreign press, but has yet to crack any of the big mainstream newspapers and magazines here. It operated below the radar while Clinton was in office and has recently resurfaced because of the uncanny similarities between its policies and that of the Bush Administration on matters relating to national defense to Asia and the Middle East.

Most of its members cut their teeth in the Reagan and the first Bush Administrations. However, many of its former members, notably Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney, are working in the current Bush Administration. William Kristol, the editor of the ultra-conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, heads PNAC.

In the past year, the organization has succeeded in getting the Bush Administration to scrap the Armyis Crusader Artillery Program and to ask Congress for a one-year increase of more than $48 billion for national defense. But itis PNAC's position to drive America into a war with Iraq that has influenced Bush the most.

Dozens of letters and reports by PNAC members concerning Iraq are posted on its website, www.newamericancentury.org, and lays out in startling detail how war is the only way to deal with the so-called threat that Iraq poses to the U.S. Bush has drawn upon many of these letters to publicly make a case for war. Reading through the letters, the impression it leaves is not that the U.S. is in imminent danger but that the people that run PNAC have been hell-bent for war for six years and they finally got a president who will listen to them.

Robert Kagan, co-chair of PNAC and a former Deputy for Policy in the State Department's Bureau for Inter-American Affairs during Reagan's presidency, wrote in 1999 that the U.S. should "complete the unfinished business of the 1991 Gulf War and get rid of Saddam."

It's simply not enough to increase inspections by the United Nations, PNAC says, or to think that "we can contain Saddam inside a box" to ensure the safety of the U.S. and our allies. It has to be war.

"Above all, only ground forces can remove Saddam and his regime from power and open the way for a new post-Saddam Iraq whose intentions can safely be assumed to be benign," Kristol said in a PNAC report in 1997. Containment and inspections won't work, Kristol said

Consider the impact Kristol had on Cheney when the Vice President spoke about Iraq before the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville last August.

"This is the same dictator who dispatched a team of assassins to murder former President Bush as he traveled abroad," Cheney said. "A person would be right to question any suggestion that we should just get inspectors back into Iraq, and then our worries will be over. Saddam has perfected the game of cheat and retreat, and is very skilled in the art of denial and deception. A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of his compliance with U.N. resolutions. On the contrary, there is a great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow back in his box."

"Meanwhile, he would continue to plot. Nothing in the last dozen years has stopped him -- not his agreements; not the discoveries of the inspectors; not the revelations by defectors; not criticism or ostracism by the international community; and not four days of bombings by the U.S. in 1998. What he wants is time and more time to husband his resources, to invest in his ongoing chemical and biological weapons programs, and to gain possession of nuclear arms,"Cheney said.

But the mere fact that many of these letters and policy statements about Iraq were drafted while Clinton was President raises a number of serious questions: for one, where's the evidence that suggests the U.S. is in imminent danger of being attacked by Iraq? No one at PNAC would respond to these or other questions about the organization. The one thing that is crystal clear, however, is that neither PNAC nor the Bush Administration has been able to produce a shred of evidence that justifies the U.S. going to war with Iraq. Only through a coordinated effort of injecting fear into the minds of Americans has PNAC and the Bush Administration been able to win the little support it has to start a war.

Jason Leopold can be reached at: [email protected]

Link for preceeding post


http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqmiddleeast.htm

When you read the list f members names ask yourself 'who voted for these people'?
Does Jeb Bush's presence here bring any clarity to the events of the 2000 election? Bits and pieces.
Is this why Bush asked Tom Daschle not to investigate 9/11



June 3, 1997

American foreign and defense policy is adrift. Conservatives have criticized the incoherent policies of the Clinton Administration. They have also resisted isolationist impulses from within their own ranks. But conservatives have not confidently advanced a strategic vision of America's role in the world. They have not set forth guiding principles for American foreign policy. They have allowed differences over tactics to obscure potential agreement on strategic objectives. And they have not fought for a defense budget that would maintain American security and advance American interests in the new century.

We aim to change this. We aim to make the case and rally support for American global leadership.

As the 20th century draws to a close, the United States stands as the world's preeminent power. Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge: Does the United States have the vision to build upon the achievements of past decades? Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?

We are in danger of squandering the opportunity and failing the challenge. We are living off the capital -- both the military investments and the foreign policy achievements -- built up by past administrations. Cuts in foreign affairs and defense spending, inattention to the tools of statecraft, and inconstant leadership are making it increasingly difficult to sustain American influence around the world. And the promise of short-term commercial benefits threatens to override strategic considerations. As a consequence, we are jeopardizing the nation's ability to meet present threats and to deal with potentially greater challenges that lie ahead.

We seem to have forgotten the essential elements of the Reagan Administration's success: a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States' global responsibilities.

Of course, the United States must be prudent in how it exercises its power. But we cannot safely avoid the responsibilities of global leadership or the costs that are associated with its exercise. America has a vital role in maintaining peace and security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. If we shirk our responsibilities, we invite challenges to our fundamental interests. The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire. The history of this century should have taught us to embrace the cause of American leadership.

Our aim is to remind Americans of these lessons and to draw their consequences for today. Here are four consequences:

• we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global
responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;

• we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;

• we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad;

• we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.

Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next.

Elliott Abrams Gary Bauer William J. Bennett Jeb Bush

Dick Cheney Eliot A. Cohen Midge Decter Paula Dobriansky Steve Forbes

Aaron Friedberg Francis Fukuyama Frank Gaffney Fred C. Ikle

Donald Kagan Zalmay Khalilzad I. Lewis Libby Norman Podhoretz

Dan Quayle Peter W. Rodman Stephen P. Rosen Henry S. Rowen

Donald Rumsfeld Vin Weber George Weigel Paul Wolfowitz

Very important stuff, G. More, please.

In another vein: I must bring to everyone's attention the latest effort by England's poet laureate:
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=3&art_id=iol1049461659449B635&set_id=1

It's just awful, isn't it. I mean, it's not really any better than say, something from 14 year old. (I don't know how old the poet is.) Remember, I'm the hippie peacecreep here so when I say it's awful, I say so because I think this kind of terrible writing could damage the peace movement.

Is there any chance those of you in England could assist in getting your country an actual laureate who is an actual poet??

I apologize for the digression.
Joe

Joe, don't apologize. The poem is pretty bad, I agree. But this one by Louis Simpson is not:

The Inner Part

When they had won the war
And for the first time in history
Americans were the most important people--

When the leading citizens no longer lived in their shirt sleeves,
And their wives did not scratch in public;
Just when they'd stopped saying "Gosh!"--

When their daughters seemed as sensitive
As the tip of a fly rod,
and their sons were as smooth as a V-8 engine--

Priests, examining the entrails of birds,
Found the heart misplaced, and seeds
As black as death, emitting a strange odor.

----Louis Simpson

Gelisgesti,

Please post a link for the article you posted at 5:42 this morning. Thanks.

Louis Simpson wrote that poem in the early 1960's.

It is the statement of prnciples ...... top of page


http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqmiddleeast.htm

Read the other stuff too
it will make you say 'well Ill be damned'
did me anyhow

Note the date........



September 18, 1998

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS

FROM: GARY SCHMITT

SUBJECT: Wolfowitz Statement on U.S. Policy Toward Iraq

Wednesday, Paul Wolfowitz, dean of the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of The Johns Hopkins University, and former under secretary of defense for policy, testified before the House National Security Committee on Iraq. In his testimony Wolfowitz takes the administration to task for the "muddle of confusion and pretense" that defines its current policy and offers an alternative policy which goes to "the heart of the problem," the continuing rule of Saddam Hussein and his regime in Iraq. An abbreviated version of his statement before the committee follows.



Statement before the House National Security Committee
Paul Wolfowitz

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the invitation to testify before this distinguished committee on the important subject of U.S. policy toward Iraq.

It is an honor to appear as part of a hearing in which Scott Ritter testifies. Scott Ritter is a public servant of exceptional integrity and moral courage, one of those individuals who is not afraid to speak the truth. Now he is speaking the truth about the failures of the UN inspection regime in Iraq, even though those truths are embarrassing to senior officials in the Clinton Administration. And the pressures he is being subjected to are far worse. After first trying to smear his character with anonymous leaks, the administration then took to charging that Mr. Ritter doesn't "have a clue" about U.S. policy toward Iraq and saying that his criticisms were playing into Saddam Hussein's hands by impugning UNSCOM's independence.

In fact, it is hard to know what U.S. policy is toward Iraq because it is such a muddle of confusion and pretense. Apparently, the administration makes a distinction between telling Amb. Butler not to conduct an inspection and telling him that the time is inopportune for a confrontation with Iraq and that the U.S. is not in a position to back up UNSCOM. That kind of hair-splitting only further convinces both our friends and adversaries in the Middle East that we are not serious and that our policy is collapsing. It is only reinforced when they see us going through semantic contortions to explain that North Korea is not in violation of the Framework Agreement or when they see us failing to act on the warnings that we have given to North Korea or to Milosevic or to Saddam Hussein.

The problem with U.S. policy toward Iraq is that the administration is engaged in a game of pretending that everything is fine, that Saddam Hussein remains within a "strategic box" and if he tries to break out "our response will be swift and strong." The fact is that it has now been 42 days since there have been any weapons inspections in Iraq and the swift and strong response that the Administration threatened at the time of the Kofi Annan agreement earlier this year is nowhere to be seen.

Recently a senior official in a friendly Arab government complained to me that the U.S. attaches great store to symbolic votes by the Non-Aligned Movement on the "no fly zone" in Southern Iraq, while doing nothing to deal with the heart of the problem which is Saddam himself.

The United States is unable or unwilling to pursue a serious policy in Iraq, one that would aim at liberating the Iraqi people from Saddam's tyrannical grasp and free Iraq's neighbors from Saddam's murderous threats. Such a policy, but only such a policy, would gain real support from our friends in the region. And it might eventually even gain the respect of many of our critics who are able to see that Saddam inflicts horrendous suffering on the Iraqi people, but who see U.S. policy making that suffering worse through sanctions while doing nothing about Saddam.

Administration officials continue to claim that the only alternative to maintaining the unity of the UN Security Council is to send U.S. forces to Baghdad. That is wrong. As has been said repeatedly in letters and testimony to the President and the Congress by myself and other former defense officials, including two former secretaries of defense, and a former director of central intelligence, the key lies not in marching U.S. soldiers to Baghdad, but in helping the Iraqi people to liberate themselves from Saddam.

Saddam's main strength -- his ability to control his people though extreme terror -- is also his greatest vulnerability. The overwhelming majority of people, including some of his closest associates, would like to be free of his grasp if only they could safely do so.

A strategy for supporting this enormous latent opposition to Saddam requires political and economic as well as military components. It is eminently possible for a country that possesses the overwhelming power that the United States has in the Gulf. The heart of such action would be to create a liberated zone in Southern Iraq comparable to what the United States and its partners did so successfully in the North in 1991. Establishing a safe protected zone in the South, where opposition to Saddam could rally and organize, would make it possible:

• For a provisional government of free Iraq to organize, begin to gain international recognition and begin to publicize a political program for the future of Iraq;

• For that provisional government to control the largest oil field in Iraq and make available to it, under some kind of appropriate international supervision, enormous financial resources for political, humanitarian and eventually military purposes;

• Provide a safe area to which Iraqi army units could rally in opposition to Saddam, leading to the liberation of more and more of the country and the unraveling of the regime.

This would be a formidable undertaking, and certainly not one which will work if we insist on maintaining the unity of the UN Security Council. But once it began it would begin to change the calculations of Saddam's opponents and supporters -- both inside and outside the country -- in decisive ways. One Arab official in the Gulf told me that the effect inside Iraq of such a strategy would be "devastating" to Saddam. But the effect outside would be powerful as well. Our friends in the Gulf, who fear Saddam but who also fear ineffective American action against him, would see that this is a very different U.S. policy. And Saddam's supporters in the Security Council -- in particular France and Russia -- would suddenly see a different prospect before them. Instead of lucrative oil production contracts with the Saddam Hussein regime, they would now have to calculate the economic and commercial opportunities that would come from ingratiating themselves with the future government of Iraq.

The Clinton Administration repeatedly makes excuses for its own weakness by arguing that the coalition against Saddam is not what it was seven years ago. But in fact, that coalition didn't exist at all when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The United States, under George Bush's leadership, put that coalition together by demonstrating that we had the strength and the seriousness of purpose to carry through to an effective conclusion. President Bush made good on those commitments despite powerful opposition in the U.S. Congress. The situation today is easier in many respects: Iraq is far weaker; American strength is much more evident to everyone, including ourselves; and the Congress would be far more supportive of decisive action. If this Administration could muster the necessary strength of purpose, it would be possible to liberate ourselves, our friends and allies in the region, and the Iraqi people themselves, from the menace of Saddam Hussein.

Ge, I have read all of what you posted above. I had read bits and pieces of it before, online and in the print media.

In the debate that centers on the future of our country, these principles of the PNAC are sign-posted at a junction in our path. Some who debate this country's role in the world will head one way, goose-stepping down the road posted PNAC. Others of us are heading the other way at the Y.

I wonder if these ideas and their counter will play a role in next year's election.

Election???
We have had two 'elections' that should point to the outcome of the next 'appointment' of officials.

Democracy is at an ebb .... replaced by ideology ....... if a triple amputee from Vietnam has to prove his patriotism, how can we justify our apathy .....

Machiavelli strikes from the grave.

The patriot was beat by the rebel flag Gelisgesti, that is truly sad <sigh>

Peace is not yet in hand, and itself poses great challenge. Still, it doesn't look good for the War Critics. Unpleasant surprises are always possible, and of course, should such occur, unpleasant. Disaster stems often from the lack of the means and ability, the flexibility, to recognize and respond effectively to unpleasant surprises. Whatever the politicians and diplomats may or may not do in the matter of peace, the US Military demonstrates competence in its area of concern. Tommy Franks' plan has been sufficiently flexible as to render the military mission a success of historic proportion. I have no doubt the Politicians and Diplomats will do little to lessen the need for men such as Franks.