[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
Zap Branigan wrote:
You get 30 minutes of selective reporting each week and you complain about “spin”.
You need to learn the definition of “spin”. My “selectiveness” varies at least.
Tell me how long it should take to report how many marines got killed today. Now tell me why I have to listen to some “analyst” explain why for 20 minutes–as if he or she could possibly know.
How much more informed are you about world events and is directly related to how many hours a day you spend watching Bill Oreilly or Keith Oberman? Give me a break.
I spoke how much I “watch” the news…30 minutes is all because I don’t have much time but I read the headlines every day. Is that sufficient, all knowing, news guru?
24x7 news is killing the country’s collective intelligence. [/quote]
You read the headlines too? Wow you must be really well informed!
If I had a penny for every misleading headline I could retire today.
Try reading the articles and then read other articles about the same subject.
You will realized how flawed your approach to the news is.
Nor will it probably stop once we are gone.[/quote]
So, beatings will continue until the killings stop.
Pretty damning view of humanity (in the ME anyway). The only way to achieve and maintain peace is through sustained tyrannical oppression and brute force.
[quote]Two: The fact of our enormous and heavily fortified new Baghdad embassy is all the evidence any rational person should require that the U.S. has no intention of completely withdrawing from Iraqi soil anyway, so talking about the conditions under which the occupation will end is pointless. We have invested billions to build an Iraq that will do business with America (and will likely invest billions more), and it would be foolish not to stick around and protect that investment.
Simply put, my argument is this: regardless of what we should or should not do, we will be in Iraq until the Iraqis, like the Vietnamese before them, find a way to remove us.
Which I doubt they will.[/quote]
I haven’t reviewed the blueprints of the embassy or anything, but it’s an embassy, not an military base. My understanding is that the residential portion can’t house an “occupying force” and SAM sight is barely capable of defending the compound (it’s already had a hole blown in it). Bill Gates is more capable of occupying Washington state than that embassy is of occupying Iraq.
Pretty damning view of humanity (in the ME anyway). The only way to achieve and maintain peace is through sustained tyrannical oppression and brute force.[/quote]
You’re right, it is a damning view, but not an overly inaccurate one, given the history of the region since circa the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
If you have a viable and realistic alternative to oppressive strongman rule; one which will furthermore allow the full withdrawal of U.S. occupation forces, please share it with us.
It is not a military base, I agree. It’s actually more like the imperial fortresses that Rome used to set up in the lands it conquered.
I haven’t reviewed the blueprints either, as they are of course top secret. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee report divulged a few details, some of which I have repeated in the post above.
Regardless, it is 104 acres of prime Baghdad real estate that is going to be permanently occupied by 5,500 American staff members and a large detachment of Marines. It is furthermore going to be a monumental bone of contention, and a constant target of attack. With each attack, security (meaning firepower and military manpower) will increase.
I will say it again. We will never completely leave Iraq, until the Iraqis force us to leave. They are doing their damnedest, but to little effect so far.
No they didn’t. The US supported Saddam for a few years until it became it was obvious he was a madman and then the US withdrew their support.
France and Germany never stopped supporting him.[/quote]
The U.S. supported Saddam Hussein throughout the 1980s right up until the Gulf War. He was well known to be a lunatic throughout this period, but the U.S. supported him anyway. The U.S. supported him for many years. That is a fact.
Whether the French and German governments supported him makes no difference to me. All I know is that the U.S government did. Ironically, during a time when Iraq was at its strongest. Conveniently, the American government didn’t perceive him as a threat then.
No they didn’t. The US supported Saddam for a few years until it became it was obvious he was a madman and then the US withdrew their support.
France and Germany never stopped supporting him.
The U.S. supported Saddam Hussein throughout the 1980s right up until the Gulf War. He was well known to be a lunatic throughout this period, but the U.S. supported him anyway. The U.S. supported him for many years. That is a fact.
Whether the French and German governments supported him makes no difference to me. All I know is that the U.S government did. Ironically, during a time when Iraq was at its strongest. Conveniently, the American government didn’t perceive him as a threat then.
Dustin[/quote]
This is incorrect. The US scaled back and finally withdrew aid from Saddam long before the Gulf War.
france and germany continued to support saddam long after it was obvious he was a homicidial maniac.
[/quote]
So did we.
The Reagan administration gave Saddam roughly $40 billion in aid in the 1980s to fight Iran, nearly all of it on credit. The U.S. also sent billions of dollars to Saddam to keep him from forming a strong alliance with the Soviets.[20] Saddam’s Iraq became " the third-largest recipient of US assistance" [11].
It has nothing to due extracting resources or to make an immediate profit off the oil. Its about strategic control. Whoever has their hand on the spigot, so to speak, controls the world. If we have boots on the ground, no one else can control it. This is nothing new and the U.S. (and British) government has realized this for generations.
we have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population…In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity…To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives…We should cease to talk about vague and…unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better. George Kennan 1948
Saudi Arabia remains the cornerstone, producing 50 percent of the whole world’s [oil] supply. So in order to keep this economic balm flowing, to keep the status quo static and the balance sheets of the major oil companies brimming, we’ve [the U.S.] installed our military as a kind of mega police force in the region. Our official reason for being there is to ensure ?stability,? one of the great buzzwords in the history of business, but this is nothing more than spin ? the military is in the Middle East to guarantee that whatever comes out of the ground is exploitable and controlled by American multinationals. ? Johnny Angel, It’s the Oil, Stupid, LA Weekly, September 26, 2001
The old Soviet empire had a long border with the Middle East. The desperation of the West to maintain control stems from the potential for those two regions to join. If that had happened, the Middle East would have had the weapons to protect their resources. The resources of the Soviet Union and the Middle East together would have been comparable to those of the West, and, by virtue of most of the world’s reserves of oil being within the borders of those two empires, and thus the potential for high oil prices, a good part of the West’s wealth could have been claimed by the East. Hence the West’s large military expenditures to maintain control in that volatile region. ? J.W. Smith, World’s Wasted Wealth II, (Institute for Economic Democracy, 1994), pp. 294 - 295.
In 1958, Eisenhower asked his National Security Council why this campaign of hatred exists amongst the Arab World (people not the governments) towards the U.S. The National Security Council outlined the basic reasons:
the US supports corrupt and oppressive governments and is “opposing political or economic progress” because of its interest in controlling the oil resources of the region.
This is incorrect. The US scaled back and finally withdrew aid from Saddam long before the Gulf War.[/quote]
Might want to double check that. Look at my response to Jeffr, the wiki quote about Reagan supporting Hussein throughout the 1980s. We didn’t scale back “long before the war”.
I’m not any happier than you are that our country supported a sumbitch like Saddam. It is the truth though.
This is incorrect. The US scaled back and finally withdrew aid from Saddam long before the Gulf War.
Might want to double check that. Look at my response to Jeffr, the wiki quote about Reagan supporting Hussein throughout the 1980s. We didn’t scale back “long before the war”.
I’m not any happier than you are that our country supported a sumbitch like Saddam. It is the truth though.
Dustin
[/quote]
Look into the dates that the aid was given and withdrawn and you will see that I am correct. Support for Saddam was withdrawn well before the Gulf War and the support was scaled back and withdrawn mostly in response to his use of chemical weapons and other atrocities.
[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
Look into the dates that the aid was given and withdrawn and you will see that I am correct. Support for Saddam was withdrawn well before the Gulf War and the support was scaled back and withdrawn mostly in response to his use of chemical weapons and other atrocities.[/quote]
Official support, yes. Unofficial support? We may never know.
“US intelligence helped Saddam’s Ba’ath Party seize power for the first time in 1963. Evidence suggests that Saddam was on the CIA payroll as early as 1959, when he participated in a failed assassination attempt against Iraqi strongman Abd al-Karim Qassem. In the 1980s, the US and Britain backed Saddam in the war against Iran, giving Iraq arms, money, satellite intelligence, and even chemical & bio-weapon precursors. As many as 90 US military advisors supported Iraqi forces and helped pick targets for Iraqi air and missile attacks.”
Includes links to lots of interesting articles, including allegations that the CIA provided Saddam with hit lists for the 1963 Ba’athist coup. Just like we did for Suharto in 1965.
“Donald H. Rumsfeld went to Baghdad in March 1984 with instructions to deliver a private message about weapons of mass destruction: that the United States’ public criticism of Iraq for using chemical weapons would not derail Washington’s attempts to forge a better relationship, according to newly declassified documents.”
Another good line from that article:
“When asked whether the U.S.'s conclusion that Iraq had used chemical weapons would have “any effect on U.S. recent initiatives to expand commercial relationships with Iraq across a broad range, and also a willingness to open diplomatic relations,” the department’s spokesperson said ‘No. I’m not aware of any change in our position. We’re interested in being involved in a closer dialogue with Iraq’”
That closer dialogue ended not when the United States suddenly realized that Saddam was “a lunatic” (which he was not), or that he was “dangerous” (we knew that for decades), but rather when he became inconvenient to our national interests in the region.
