The US, UN & Iraq II

and as conquerors it is our responsibility to punish them?

France is by far not alone in its stances, and not even within UN. Why does it get accused as the sole troublemaker constantly?

Wow----I go out for dinner and come back to all this attention----- Gee I didn't know you guys cared so much and special thanks to you Gelisgesti for your recognition but please no more deep bowing----just send money.

For some reason, today I saw a lot of e-mail from The War Zone ... more than has been common the last several days, anyway. Other contacts have been notably more active as well. The Ground War goes well for Coalition forces throughout the South, despite first sand and dust like a Northwoods Blizzard and now mud the consistency of vaseline ... the "Badguys" have offered us much opportunity to shoot at them. Our accuracy has been impressive, and the "Badguys" have realized little success while incurring considerable cost. Saddam continues to trade lives , machinery, and territory for time. Private indicatoions are that both Western and Northern Fronts are building well, and soon. perhaps very much sooner than some expect, will be of major influence. It appears Tommy Franks has no intention of surrendering the initiative, but in fact intends, and has the means and geography, to do so. The flexibility of "The Plan" seems more than merely adequate. Militarily at least, we apparently enjoy increasing advantage. From a purely operational standpoint, it would appear RPGs have had far greater effect on The Press than they have had on the M1 tanks against which they have been employed. I have it on very good authority that battle damage repair consumes significantly less maintainance reources than do routine upkeep and accident repair. Fleet personnel assigned hospital ship duty suffer from acute boredom. Materiel handling personnel air, sea, and land, are busier than hell. My son is well, and rather disturbed that Marines have drowned in the desert. I gather also that he is further north than he had anticipated would be the case at this time. He is a bit perturbed in that he feels "It is time to take the gloves off", and that the surest way to minimize casualties and damage is to unleash the full fury of US capability.

I sorta agree. I think it unlikely, though.

Unlikely is right; the US must continue to worry about collateral damage no matter how difficult that makes this war. c.i.

(My post got shot into cyberspace -- let me try again and hope this isn't a repeat.)

France (I say again for the umpteenth time) is hardly perfect. But let's imagine that France were about to invade another country and we thought they were completely bonkers and made every effort to stop them. Now the shoe is on the other foot. Would it be fair to treat us as we have treated France?

I gotta think some of The French Position in the current brouhaha stems from the fact The US kicked France out of Suez a while back. Still, I think France has overplayed her hand already, and I suspect she. whether blithely or defiantly, intends to continue to buy into the pot. She has cost herself, and The UN, much, for very little return.

Many Iraqis head home to defend their country from foreign armies
On the Iraq-Jordan border ?- For Jassim Mohammed Laftah, the decision to abandon his life in Jordan and go home to a war zone, across a western desert that is now a battlefield, was an uncomplicated, patriotic one.
"I'm going back to Iraq to join fellow Iraqis in their jihad and the defence of our country against the American invaders," the 30-year-old car mechanic said shortly before he headed off, unarmed, to Baghdad, as part of a convoy of volunteer soldiers eager to defend President Saddam Hussein's regime.
"When the Americans invaded my country, I felt my duty is to sacrifice my life for our leader ... and for my country."
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030326.urefu0326/BNStory/International

Over 5,000 Iraqis return home from Jordan
5,284 Iraqis have crossed border into Iraq since March 16, contradicting Jordan's expectations.

AL KARAMEH, on the Jordan-Iraq border - More than 5,000 Iraqis have crossed from Jordan into Iraq over the last week, a border guard official at al-Karameh said Monday.
Colonel Ahmad al-Hazaymeh, chief of the al-Karameh frontier post, told the official Petra news agency that "5,284 Iraqis have crossed the border into Iraq since March 16."
"Between Sunday and Monday morning, 566 Iraqis returned home," he told the official Petra news agency.
He said Jordan had been expecting "movement in the opposite direction" from Iraq to Jordan, but it had not occurred yet.
No Iraqi refugees have entered Jordan since the US-led war aimed at toppling the regime in Baghdad began on Thursday
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=4824

Young men return to join fight against Allies
By Justin Huggler in Amman
25 March 2003
The young men waiting aboard the grubby bus that was taking them home to Iraq were adamant. "We are going back to fight the Americans and the British," one of them said. "We are going back to fight for our homeland."
One of the others added: "If the Jordanians would let us, we would take guns with us now, so we could start fighting them the moment we crossed the border."
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=390534

The 173rd Airborne is on the ground in Iraqi Kurdistan. Turkey's foot-dragging - and where is the outcry on France's refusal to participate in "planning assistance to fellow NATO member Turkey"??? - is the greatest stroke of luck in this war so far <G>

With enemies like France, we need require little of our freinds.


How'd the presentation go, HofT?

Kosovo for the Kurds - Which peoples should govern themselves? Our answers are as confused as ever .

This commend by Timothy Garton Ash in today's Guardian comes to the conclusion that
"when this bleedin' war is over, we'll be back in 1918, confronting many of the same questions in the same places that our grandparents wrestled with, from the Balkans to the Middle East. And we still don't have answers. Sometimes I think we should reinvent the Ottoman empire. "

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,922543,00.html

I heard on the BBC this morning that the Americans were preparing to use chemical weapons against Iraqi irregular forces in Baghdad.

(Before anyone says these are benign sleeping agents, they're not. They induce severe states of psychosis nausesa and vomiting. They kill weaker people and children. The Russians pumped similiar bio-chemical warfare agents at the Moscow theatre seige, killing 120 hostages).

So we have Donald Rumsfeld showing pictures of prisoners bound and shackled, hoods on heads, blindfolded and with ear defenders, squatting in a line before their guards, awaiting interrogation sessions at Guantanamo Bay, complaining that Iraqi tv interviews of American prisoners contravenes the Geneva Conventions (which it does), while waging an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign state to rid that country of chemical weapons, but preparing to use those weapons in violation of all international chemical weapons protocols and the rules of war.

How the hell did we get here?

Good question Wilso

Suggest you ask Donald Rumsfeld, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Project for the New American Century.

[But if you ask me its part of the 'Manifest Destiny' thing, only this time it's the Mid East not the Mid West]

And for those who don't appreciate my sense of humour, that was a joke; whereas my previous post, about the US preparing to use chemical weapons in Iraq was not.

The next thing will be some propaganda about them not really being chemical weapons

About that Market Place disaster.

The US amry said the damage could have been caused by a surface-to-air missile fired by the Iraqis or fallout from Iraqi anti-aircraft artillery.

Have you seen the devastation? Television images showed crumbling buildings and burned out cars.

I'm no expert but can this be cause by a simple SAM? That must have been a huge blow. And i dont think a SAM contains enough explosives to create that kind of devastation.

Wilso asked
How the hell did we get here?


There was ths injunction from the supreme court ..... something about disregarding the votes of a couple hundred thousand voters.

And America stood by.

Walter - Timothy Garton Ash is a learned man who certainly knows better than to propose bringing back the Ottoman Empire as a solution; his model would apply equally to peoples far from those lands - Tibetans, Chechens, Uighurs, Basques, et al. Besides, the solution to the Gordian knot was already discovered by fellow Westerner Alexander of Macedon.

Timber - tks for asking; hope to see positive results within next 30 to 90 days max. So much depends on people thinking like Harold Macmillan - when he was first elected PM he was asked by a journalist what would guide his strategy in foreign affairs, to which he replied: "Events, dear boy, events."

Steve - manifest destiny?

"Take up the White Man's Burden-
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard."

Does this apply to those still fighting the 2000 election in 2003?!

<G>

And America stood by ....

A further answer to Wilso's inquiry ....



It is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. Herman Goering