The US, UN & Iraq II

from reuters news agency

A backpat to nimh's contributions from timber, too. Some folks "get it" when it comes to debate and exchange of ideas, others don't.

The article says it all

(deleted)

OK Habibi

Could you enlighten us as to the national origin of your name--- not that it matters because you seem rational and fair in your responses and I respect your position.

This is an aside:
I have just heard on TV from a US missionary who entered northern Iraq and is staying with some family members. He was shocked by the fear of Saddam forces his family members exhibited. He was against the war---the plight of the people in the area and their fear caused him to change his mind. He was with Asyrian people---these are the native people of that area and he compared them to the American Indian.

Bernie - You keep bringing this up and--since you seem like a rational, intelligent, and evolved sort--I keep trying to help you see that this is simply an assault on religion.

It doesn't matter what Bush's or anyone's "influences" are. What matters are what actions he takes, what policies he pushes, what statements he makes. Whether or not those are influenced by his religion is only an issue if you wish to attack his religion--which by definition becomes a challenge to his right to believe as he believes. That, as I understand our Constitution, is a "no-no".

Every position Bush holds that you would claim stems from his religion COULD stem from elsewhere. Some people oppose abortion based on their faith, some based on their gut. Some oppose Roe V. Wade because they think it is what God wants. Others hold the exact same POSITION because they think Roe V. Wade is bad law. Your position seems to be that it is okay to oppose Roe V. Wade for legal reasons, but not for religious ones. (And again, I'm no Constitutional scholar, but that seems, er... wrong to me.)

The reference to America's "liberation of Europe," even to the extent that it is true, is no longer applicable in the sense that this is a different world, a different population, a different administration. Only the names of the nations remain the same.... mostly. We (excluding now a few very elderly people who actually fought in WWII) weren't a part of it, can take no credit. Or, if we do, we should logically accept responsibility for century-old actions which we're much, much less proud of and which get glossed over in the history books!

Members or former members of the military here have behaved, once the invasion started, as military do: they wished for the success of the mission. God knows I don't begrudge them their hopes. But they have a different mindset from those of us who chose other careers and who have not been trained to be loyal to a CinC, or to the generals and other officers who are spokespersons for the invasion. However, they and most of us here are the free citizens who elected -- or in this case did little to prevent the transition to -- this CinC and his administration. History and the Constitution assign us the responsibility for that administration's actions, like them or not. While we are grateful for a well-trained military, it's important that we express our disapproval of their deployment if it is illegitimate and do everything we can to stop it or see that the "perps" are judged and removed. We are, after all, the bosses; we pay the salaries; we have great moral, legal, and political responsibility for how the military are used.

There are many Americans who regard this invasion as a criminal undertaking and its perpetrators as criminals. Where does that put the military -- their pawns, so to speak? That's question raises very difficult issues since we don't personally see our troops as criminals. My beliefs tell me that the further up the ladder of command one goes, the greater the culpability.

We shouldn't forget that, during "war," each side will portray action in a light most favorable to them. That we're doing now, in this country, goes without saying. Just as in every other war, the truth will out years later. I'm reluctant to join in a bloodlust as a result of what we believe has been done to our POW's until we know more. In the meantime, I wait and hope with all my heart that no one is being treated cruelly by either side.

Exchanges like this are what make these discussions worthwhile. When we gnaw upon these bones of contention long enough once in a while we latch onto a sliver of agreement. It doesn't happen often, and that's a shame, because I think we would accomplish more that is meaningful by playing in the margins of these areas of agreement, rather than stomping about in the tall grass of contrariness.

(Stop me before I metaphorize again!)

<grins>

Now how did I know that out of all my overlong post, this would be the one thing you'd pick up on? I hadnt quite thought it would be the only thing you'd pick up on, but that you would, I somehow knew.

Call me psychic :wink:

Interesting aside, by the way. Thinking of what the Kurds, who are relatively many and well-organised, went through, you can only shiver at what the Assyrians might have gone through.

I'm Dutch, by the way. The habibi could be me or you, however you'd like to interpret the comma. It's there as a souvenir to a random memory (buried somewhere deep in an Abuzz 'What made you smile today' thread).

This is the reality of war. We bomb. They suffer



Veteran war reporter Robert Fisk tours the Baghdad hospital to see the wounded after a devastating night of air strikes




Robert Fisk from Baghdad
23 March 2003


Donald Rumsfeld says the American attack on Baghdad is "as targeted an air campaign as has ever existed" but he should not try telling that to five-year-old Doha Suheil. She looked at me yesterday morning, drip feed attached to her nose, a deep frown over her small face as she tried vainly to move the left side of her body. The cruise missile that exploded close to her home in the Radwaniyeh suburb of Baghdad blasted shrapnel into her tiny legs ­ they were bound up with gauze ­ and, far more seriously, into her spine. Now she has lost all movement in her left leg.

Her mother bends over the bed and straightens her right leg which the little girl thrashes around outside the blanket. Somehow, Doha's mother thinks that if her child's two legs lie straight beside each other, her daughter will recover from her paralysis. She was the first of 101 patients brought to the Al-Mustansaniya College Hospital after America's blitz on the city began on Friday night. Seven other members of her family were wounded in the same cruise missile bombardment; the youngest, a one-year-old baby, was being breastfed by her mother at the time.

There is something sick, obscene about these hospital visits. We bomb. They suffer. Then we turn up and take pictures of their wounded children. The Iraqi minister of health decides to hold an insufferable press conference outside the wards to emphasise the "bestial" nature of the American attack. The Americans say that they don't intend to hurt children. And Doha Suheil looks at me and the doctors for reassurance, as if she will awake from this nightmare and move her left leg and feel no more pain.

So let's forget, for a moment, the cheap propaganda of the regime and the equally cheap moralising of Messrs Rumsfeld and Bush, and take a trip around the Al-Mustansaniya College Hospital. For the reality of war is ultimately not about military victory and defeat, or the lies about "coalition forces" which our "embedded" journalists are now peddling about an invasion involving only the Americans, the British and a handful of Australians. War, even when it has international legitimacy ­ which this war does not ­ is primarily about suffering.

Take 50-year-old Amel Hassan, a peasant woman with tattoos on her arms and legs but who now lies on her hospital bed with massive purple bruises on her shoulders ­ they are now twice their original size ­ who was on her way to visit her daughter when the first American missile struck Baghdad. "I was just getting out of the taxi when there was a big explosion and I fell down and found my blood everywhere," she told me. "It was on my arms, my legs, my chest." Amel Hassan still has multiple shrapnel wounds in her chest.

Her five-year-old daughter Wahed lies in the next bed, whimpering with pain. She had climbed out of the taxi first and was almost at her aunt's front door when the explosion cut her down. Her feet are still bleeding although the blood has clotted around her toes and is staunched by the bandages on her ankles and lower legs. Two little boys are in the next room. Sade Selim is 11; his brother Omar is 14. Both have shrapnel wounds to their legs and chest.

Isra Riad is in the third room with almost identical injuries, in her case shrapnel wounds to the legs as she ran in terror from her house into her garden as the blitz began. Imam Ali is 23 and has multiple shrapnel wounds in her abdomen and lower bowel. Najla Hussein Abbas still tries to cover her head with a black scarf but she cannot hide the purple wounds to her legs. Multiple shrapnel wounds. After a while, "multiple shrapnel wounds" sounds like a natural disease which, I suppose ­ among a people who have suffered more than 20 years of war ­ it is.

And all this, I asked myself yesterday, was all this for 11 September 2001? All this was to "strike back" at our attackers, albeit that Doha Suheil, Wahed Hassan and Imam Ali have nothing ­ absolutely nothing ­ to do with those crimes against humanity, any more than has the awful Saddam? Who decided, I wonder, that these children, these young women, should suffer for 11 September?

Wars repeat themselves. Always, when "we" come to visit those we have bombed, we have the same question. In Libya in 1986, I remember how American reporters would repeatedly cross-question the wounded: had they perhaps been hit by shrapnel from their own anti-aircraft fire? Again, in 1991, "we" asked the Iraqi wounded the same question. And yesterday, a doctor found himself asked by a British radio reporter - yes, you've guessed it - "Do you think, doctor, that some of these people could have been hit by Iraqi anti-aircraft fire?"

Should we laugh or cry at this? Should we always blame "them" for their own wounds? Certainly we should ask why those cruise missiles exploded where they did, at least 320 in Baghdad alone, courtesy of the USS Kitty Hawk.

Isra Riad came from Sayadiyeh where there is a big military barracks. Najla Abbas's home is in Risalleh where there are villas belonging to Saddam's family. The two small Selim brothers live in Shirta Khamse where there is a store house for military vehicles. But that's the whole problem. Targets are scattered across the city. The poor - and all the wounded I saw yesterday were poor - live in cheap, sometimes wooden houses that collapse under blast damage.

It is the same old story. If we make war - however much we blather on about our care for civilians - we are going to kill and maim the innocent.

Dr Habib Al-Hezai, whose FRCS was gained at Edinburgh University, counted 101 patients of the total 207 wounded in the raids in his hospital alone, of whom 85 were civilians - 20 of them women and six of them children - and 16 soldiers. A young man and a child of 12 had died under surgery. No one will say how many soldiers were killed during the actual attack.

Driving across Baghdad yesterday was an eerie experience. The targets were indeed carefully selected even though their destruction inevitably struck the innocent. There was one presidential palace I saw with 40ft high statues of the Arab warrior Salaheddin in each corner - the face of each was, of course, that of Saddam - and, neatly in between, a great black hole gouged into the façade of the building. The ministry of air weapons production was pulverised, a massive heap of pre-stressed concrete and rubble.

But outside, at the gate, there were two sandbag emplacements with smartly dressed Iraqi soldiers, rifles over the parapet, still ready to defend their ministry from the enemy which had already destroyed it.

The morning traffic built up on the roads beside the Tigris. No driver looked too hard at the Republican Palace on the other side of the river nor the smouldering ministry of armaments procurement. They burned for 12 hours after the first missile strikes. It was as if burning palaces and blazing ministries and piles of smoking rubble were a normal part of daily Baghdad life. But then again, no one under the present regime would want to spend too long looking at such things, would they?

And Iraqis have noticed what all this means. In 1991, the Americans struck the refineries, the electricity grid, the water pipes, communications. But yesterday, Baghdad could still function. The landline telephones worked; the internet operated; the electrical power was at full capacity; the bridges over the Tigris remained unbombed. Because, of course, when - "if" is still a sensitive phrase these days - the Americans get here, they will need a working communications system, electricity, transport. What has been spared is not a gift to the Iraqi people: it is for the benefit of Iraq's supposed new masters.

The Iraq daily newspaper emerged yesterday with an edition of just four pages, a clutch of articles on the "steadfastness" of the nation - steadfastness in Arabic is soummoud, the same name as the missile that Iraq partially destroyed before Bush forced the UN inspectors to leave by going to war - and a headline which read "President: Victory will come [sic] in Iraqi hands".

Again, there has been no attempt by the US to destroy the television facilities because they presumably want to use them on arrival. During the bombing on Friday night, an Iraqi general appeared live on television to reassure the nation of victory. As he spoke, the blast waves from cruise missile explosions blew in the curtains behind him and shook the television camera.

So where does all this lead us? In the early hours of yesterday morning, I looked across the Tigris at the funeral pyre of the Republican Palace and the colonnaded ministry beside it. There were beacons of fire across Baghdad and the sky was lowering with smoke, the buttressed, rampart-like palace - sheets of flame soaring from its walls - looked like a medieval castle ablaze; Tsesiphon destroyed, Mesopotamia at the moment of its destruction as it has been seen for many times over so many thousands of years.

Xenophon struck south of here, Alexander to the north. The Mongols sacked Baghdad. The caliphs came. And then the Ottomans and then the British. All departed. Now come the Americans. It's not about legitimacy. It's about something much more seductive, something Saddam himself understands all too well, a special kind of power, the same power that every conqueror of Iraq wished to demonstrate as he smashed his way into the land of this ancient civilisation.

Yesterday afternoon the Iraqis lit massive fires of oil around the city of Baghdad in the hope of misleading the guidance system of the cruise missiles. Smoke against computers. The air-raid sirens began to howl again just after 3.20pm London time, followed by the utterly predictable sound of explosions.

People would have me believe that this was the work of Saddam Hussein.

A few days ago I heard a report that Syria might come to Saddam's aid (remember that Tariq Aziz flew to Damascus for a meeting the first day of the invasion) -- because it (and much of the Arab world, apparently) believes Bush wants Syria too. Now I wonder whether we're not seeing a kind of escalation, whether deliberately provoked or not... :

DAMASCUS, Syria (CNN) -- A Syrian bus inside Iraq carrying 37 Syrian civilian passengers was hit by a U.S. missile Monday, killing five and injuring at least 15, according to Syrian government officials.
Monday, March 24, 2003 Posted: 7:20 AM EST (1220 GMT)
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/03/24/sprj.irq.syria.bus/

Syria seeks Arab condemnation of war
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030324-084756-6949r

A Syrian official said the Foreign Ministry had summoned the U.S. and British ambassadors to Damascus "to protest this appalling aggression."
Syria, which strongly opposes the U.S.-led war on Iraq, has repeatedly called for a peaceful solution of the Iraq-U.S. dispute over Baghdad's weapons arsenal. http://www.gomemphis.com/mca/america_at_war/article/0,1426,MCA_945_1835685,00.html

Precision Weapons Hit Bus 100 Miles Inside Syria The Pentagon's precision weaponry has once again proved to be as reliable as a sieve on the high seas. As two cruise missiles landed in Turkey, fortunately causing no victims, a third missile flew 100 miles inside Syria, striking a bus. Five people are reported dead and ten injured, according to local sources quoted by western news agencies.

It would appear that the Pentagon needs to give the US forces some more target practice. After shooting down a British warplane, killing its two pilots, now not only have they hit the wrong target, but also the wrong country.

If Donald Rumsfeld's forces are not capable of using this weaponry, he should either cease using the description "precision" or cease using the weaponry. How many innocent civilians are going to be murdered by the forces of this cold-blooded administration?
Timothy BANCROFT-HINCHEY
PRAVDA.Ru
http://english.pravda.ru/usa/2003/03/24/44908.html

This article is by David Horowitz (a peace march activist during the Vietnam conflict) and he is fearful of the current demonstrations that he says are designed to divert police from terrorist search activities.




The Second Front
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Before the fighting started, one of the fears expressed by critics of the war to liberate Iraq was the prospect of terrorist attacks that al-Qaeda and other jihadist organizations might launch against Americans at home and abroad. A war on Iraq would distract us from the war on terror. The Democratic Party, which did not want to go to war against Iraq in 1991 or 2003, made this its principal point of criticism of Administration policy. It was the pre-war theme of Democrats like Joe Biden, ranking member on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, Tom Daschle, Senate Minority Leader, Ted Kennedy and ex-President Bill Clinton.





(There have been honorable and worthy exceptions like Senator Joe Lieberman and Representative Dick Gephardt. But the majority of elected Democrats, and the party itself have steadfastly sounded this theme.)


Indeed, on the eve of the war, a call was issued in the name of the (probably dead) Osama bin Laden to launch such an assault on Americans as a "second front" to support the regime of Saddam Hussein.


But the war came and the terror did not. In the days leading up to the conflict, the American-led anti-terror coalition was even able to apprehend the number three Al-Qaeda leader and chief of its operations. It is a remarkable fact, often overlooked by critics that whatever may have happened to Osama bin Laden there have been no successful terror attacks by al-Qaeda on Americans at home since 9/11. This is the strongest tribute possible to the aggressive strategy of the Bush Administration, which has kept the terrorist enemy off balance and in disarray, and which is built on the perception that the war against terror and the war against regimes that harbor terrorists are one and the same.


But there is another front in the war against America, which has not been so quiet. This is the war orchestrated by the anti-American left at home and abroad. While U.S. and British troops risk their lives to conduct a war of liberation remarkable in its effort to prevent civilian casualties on the other side, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators blocked traffic on American streets and tied up police endangering civilian lives on our own. In New York, Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles and cities across the country, activists are breaking the law in a manner calculated to cause economic disruption and urban chaos. In accord with the plans of the organizers, thousands of police who are an integral element of Homeland Security defense have been tied up attempting to prevent the activists from escalating their war at home to a level of serious violence.


This violence is coming. Molotov cocktails were confiscated in San Francisco, where an activist also took his own life in a fall from the Golden Gate Bridge. Thousands of law-breaking activists have been arrested. Abroad, where police are not so solicitous of rioters, several activists were killed.


It would be unwise not to take the threat posed by this organized attack on American policy and American security seriously. The misnamed "anti-war" movement is led and organized by leftist vanguards who proclaim their solidarity with terrorist states, including North Korea and Cuba, and terrorist organizations in the Middle East. One banner raised by activists in San Francisco read: "We Support Our Troops When They Shoot Their Officers."


A photo of this banner is proudly portrayed on a leftist website that has played a key role in organizing the demonstrations (and is funded in part by a foundation headed by PBS commentator Bill Moyers) at: http://sf.indymedia.org/uploads/1_shoot_officers.jpg


It took the anti-Vietnam movement five years to reach the levels of these anti-American demonstrations and another two to initiate real violence. When that line was crossed, there were more than a thousand domestic bombings, and at least one terrorist cult was launched. The current movement is potentially far more dangerous. Unlike its anti-Vietnam predecessor, it is allied with terrorist solidarity groups and radical Muslim organizations active on college campuses. This increases the likelihood that its violent tendencies will intensify as the war against terror abroad continues. The prospect that it will develop its own terrorist offshoots is real.


Unlike the anti-Vietnam efforts, the current movement is driven almost entirely by hate for American institutions policies and purposes ("Washington Is The Axis Of Evil," "America Is The Greatest Terrorist State," "No Blood For Oil"). It is not inspired by any hope - however illusory - in a utopian future in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Socialism has been dead as a serious goal for the most of the left for decades. In its core, the left has always been a nihilistic and reactionary revolt against the modern world (capitalism, individualism, liberty), which is why it can ally itself so easily now with Islamo-fascists.


This means that the present leftist revival will not be deterred by an American victory in the current war. Its ranks are likely to grow and its tactics become more radical as the general war on terror proceeds, or should the war trigger problems in other Muslim countries. It will feed on the problems of the Iraqi peace - particularly if it is a troublesome peace, and it will continue its "anti-globalism" attacks on efforts to establish a prosperous and tranquil international order.


In its potential to disrupt American post-war policy and to limit the options of the American military lie the greatest dangers of this leftist revival, especially because of its deep resonances in the Democratic Party, half of whose constituents (and many of whose leaders) are opposed to the war. The President has already warned that the effort to rebuilt Iraq, stabilize the region and carry on the war against terror "will require our sustained commitment." In order to sustain their security and foreign policy commitments, democracies require broad bi-partisan support from their parties and from their publics. It is this support that is threatened by the anti-American left, and it this test that our nation must meet.

The bullsh!t propaganda is coming thicker and faster by the minute.

Here's another historical doozie from Horowitz: "The success of the anti-Vietnam left resulted in the deaths of two and a half million people in Indo-China who were slaughtered by the Marxists after the 'peace movement' forced America's withdrawal." No doubt Horowitz read the flawed study authored by Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl Jackson, which attempted to demonstrate how a major bloodbath went down in South Vietnam following the Communist victory of 1975. This myth was pretty much put to rest by Gareth Porter and James Roberts in "Creating a Bloodbath by Statistical Manipulation." At any rate, if David is sincerely interested in learning about murder in Southeast Asia, he may begin with Zbigniew Brzezinski. "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thai to help the [Khmer Rouge]," Brzezinski has proudly admitted. In November 1980, Ray Cline, former Deputy Director of the CIA, visited a Khmer Rouge enclave inside Cambodia in his capacity as senior foreign-policy adviser to President-elect Ronald Reagan. Good old Reagan, undoubtedly a hero for Horowitz and like-minded far right demagogues, made sure Pol Pot and his genocidal and obsequious followers received $85 million from 1980 to 1986. All of this was revealed years later in correspondence between congressional lawyer Jonathan Winer, then counsel to Sen. John Kerry of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. Horowitz, to his discredit, is careless with the facts -- but then, as a propagandist, he is not in the business of truth or accuracy. David is after the "internal threat," those who would "weaken America's defenses from within," which is to say anybody who disagrees with him or US foreign policy, anybody who may elect to exercise his or her constitutional right to petition the government.

OR you might want to take a look at the Horowitz quote at the bottom of my posts... See below

This the opener to yesterday's NYTimes editorial:
Hunting for Iraq's Terror Weapons
America will not be able to claim victory in Iraq until it secures Saddam Hussein's missing troves of unconventional weapons, the ingredients for making them and the network of scientists able to produce them. This is a long-term challenge. But over the next days and weeks, American commanders face an urgent task: to make sure that none of this deadly arsenal leaks out to terrorist groups or neighboring states like Syria or Iran.


In today's Times, an interesting response from a reader:

The underlying premise of "Hunting for Iraq's Terror Weapons" (editorial, March 23) suggests that the United States will now have to play a particularly lethal game of "where are the weapons?" with surrounding countries like Syria, Jordan and Iran

Dys

That was quick reaction----you must have had that ready in your anarchist library----Jolly good show.

I personally think the safest thing would be to give in to the peace movement and turn over warmongers to the FBI, don't y'all? It's a matter of who one perceives to be the most dangerous "totalitarian enemies," isn't it.

Tartar

Have you done a flip-flop?