America's sovereign right to do whatever it pleases.................

[Thinkerman]

"America's sovereign right to do whatever it pleases"

Printed on Wednesday, April 09, 2003 @ 19:58:15 CST ( )

 

By John Chuckman

YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada)

 

(YellowTimes.org) – The U.S. is claiming a "sovereign right" to try Iraqi officials as war criminals. I thought it was a nice touch, including, as it does, an allusion both to Bush's scholarly observations on Nazis and an assertion of rights. Rights are always good, aren't they? Even when they are the rights of conquest?

 

So, you attack a country for no other reason than an arrogant demand for "regime change," overwhelm its relatively puny armed forces, kill thousands of people, and claim a "sovereign right" to bring its leaders to trial? This threatens to become the model for international affairs in the twenty-first century, the banana-republic concept applied on a world scale.

 

America has refused to have anything to do with the International Court for War Crimes, but then the Creator never granted international institutions that purity of essence that is America's peculiar birthright. International institutions are corrupt. They are foreign. And they are not inclined to do things in the American way.

 

America, babbling endlessly about its rights and the way it sees things, so often displaying impatience over listening to the other 95% of the human race, easily forgets the many incontestable horrors it has bestowed upon the world. General Pinochet's murder of perhaps 15,000 Chileans plus a few Americans who got in his way gets barely a nod of drowsy recognition. The "boyz" chugging down frosty Cokes while napalming Vietnamese villages or the blood-soaked savagery of Cambodia's rice paddies are mostly forgotten. Few Americans ever caught, or cared to imagine, the screams of the Shah's victims having their finger nails extracted.

 

There have been so many of these good works that a full list would resemble a reference book rather than an article. Dealing with them on American television would make evening watching a drag, so they are forgotten, and America lumbers on to its next bellowing claim that something about the world stands in the way of its full enjoyment of rights and privileges.

 

Of course, none of America's chosen monsters ever saw a trial or tribunal by the United States. A few of them still live in quiet retirement. Why? Because they served American interests faithfully. If Saddam is tried, it will be precisely because he failed to do so. That's certainly an inspiring reason for bombing the hell out of a country.

 

But America is doing its very best, with precision missiles and gigantic bunker busting bombs, to be sure Hussein is murdered rather than captured. His trial, even if it does happen to fall to America as a sovereign right, would be exceedingly inconvenient for relations with the Arab world.

 

The United States asserts another arrogant claim, wrapped in different words, to justify its mistreatment of prisoners from Afghanistan. It ignored the Geneva Conventions, shackled hundreds of them up, flew them, blindfolded and strapped into cargo planes, to new homes in Cuba, which consist of cages far away from everything they know, with no access to lawyers or relatives, a form of slow torture used to extract information. Never mind that information gathered in this way is more likely to tell you what you want to hear than what actually is, and never mind that treating people in this way violates every principle America likes to say it holds sacred.

 

There is still another such claim, again expressed with altered words, to proclaim its right to determine who will govern Iraq when America's destructive tantrum is over. After all, it has had such success in Afghanistan on which to build. After killing thousands of innocent people there, wrecking the country's already damaged infrastructure, and sending tens of thousands fleeing their homes in terror, it set up a government whose key achievement to date is monthly assassinations.

 

That dire concern over women's rights in Afghanistan, something carefully tailored to the psychological needs of soccer moms who might have had a doubt or two about bombing villages, has faded into the mountain mists. An excellent proxy measure of America's violent achievement in Afghanistan is offered by a Canadian documentary filmmaker who observed that outside Kabul, virtually 100% of women still wear the burqa. The figure in Kabul, the only place policed by foreign troops, is about 70% and that comes with a great deal of abuse.

 

With a record like that, why wouldn't you feel justified in violently reordering the affairs of the planet? Quick success in Iraq will undoubtedly set Washington's ideologues' glands pumping and mouths watering. There's already talk about blasting Syria. Clearly, Iraq's shell game with weapons of mass destruction was continued on a grander scale, with the elusive weapons shifted to Syria for safekeeping, perhaps shipped in milk trucks by night. Hussein wouldn't use them to protect his life. No, after defeating the United States, he undoubtedly planned to reclaim them for another diabolical plot.

 

The possibilities must seem endless to Cheney, Condi, Rumsfeld, and Co. Indeed, regretfully for the rest of the planet, they undoubtedly are.

 

[John Chuckman is former chief economist for a large Canadian oil company . He has many interests and is a lifelong student of history. He writes with a passionate desire for honesty, the rule of reason, and concern for human decency. He is a member of no political party and takes exception to what has been called America's "culture of complaint" with its habit of reducing every important issue to an unproductive argument between two simplistically defined groups. John regards it as a badge of honor to have left the United States as a poor young man from the South Side of Chicago when the country embarked on the pointless murder of something like three million Vietnamese in their own land because they happened to embrace the wrong economic loyalties. He lives in Canada, which he is fond of calling "the peaceable kingdom."]

[Thinkerman]

"The stench of colonialism"

Printed on Wednesday, April 09, 2003 @ 10:35:00

 

By Marc Sirois

YellowTimes.org Columnist (Lebanon)

 

(YellowTimes.org) – The symbolism was impossible to miss. The President of the United States traveled across an ocean to confer with his British partner in multiple wars against Iraq, collective security, and self-determination. George W. Bush and Tony Blair could have met anywhere -- London, Madrid, Geneva, etc. -- but instead chose Belfast.

 

Yes, Belfast.

 

How do you keep a straight face when you discuss what you call the "liberation" of the Iraqi people by discussing strategy in the very place where the British subjugation of the Irish people remains at its most palpable? How do you keep from giggling when you proclaim the unity of Iraq while standing in a place where people of different but very similar faiths have been violently divided by the meddling of a foreign invader? How do you expect anyone to believe that you will not set Shiites and Sunnis against each other when you ignore -- or pretend to ignore -- the facts of Catholic-Protestant enmity in Northern Ireland?

 

In Bush's case, it probably helps that he almost certainly had no idea of the immense symbolic gaffe committed by his own staff and that of Canis Familiaris Brittannicus. But what is the latter's excuse?

 

Most of the world is at best deeply worried, and at worst firmly convinced, that the Anglo-American adventure in Iraq is a portent of much misery to come, both in that unfortunate country and in other Muslim nations -- as well as in the United States and Britain. The dangers are many and murderous: civil war in Iraq, another American-led onslaught against an inconvenient regime in the Middle East (Syria? Iran?), retaliation by Islamic militants, etc.

 

There is much justification for the widespread impression that the U.S. and the British governments are using the rhetoric of "democracy" to cover up a modern day exercise in old-fashioned imperialism. The priority should be to dispel these notions by demonstrating sensitivity to these concerns and then acting in such a manner on the ground as to prove that the invasion was a necessary evil to be followed by magnanimous help in reconstruction and a speedy withdrawal.

 

Instead, Bush and Blair chose to spit on their detractors' fears and to bathe in the stench of colonialism. That sends an unfortunate message to the rest of the world, but especially to Arab governments and Arab peoples wondering where the next attack will take place.

 

Donald Rumsfeld's fantasies about total American hegemony over the world, starting with the Middle East, would be amusing if they were not so worrisome. He and the rest of the extremists who have captured Bush's limited imagination are selling damaged goods at prices that no one has even begun to discuss. What Rumsfeld proposes, and what Bush has begun to implement, is folly of the highest order because a) it is impossible; and b) attempting to do it will cause hatred for the United States, and therefore threats against Americans and their interests, to spread like wildfire. The world, especially America, will be anything but safer.

 

The Bush Doctrine, as it has evolved since Sept. 11, 2001, is amazingly exclusionary to the rights of other nation-states. This is no surprise, given that his administration had already reneged on various treaties and entered into needless conflicts with other governments, including some of its closest allies. Where the radical change has taken place is in the extent to which Washington has been willing to claim privileges for itself that don't just pose distinct threats to the barest rights of foreign countries: They obviate even the possibility of other people having any rights at all.

 

Essentially, the Bush administration has made clear that it is willing to oppose most -- if not all -- of the rest of the world in subjugating other governments that refuse to toe the American line. It will use falsified "intelligence" reports to buttress its flimsy cases, intimidate other countries into submission, and use force wherever, whenever and against whomever it sees fit.

 

Fans of such ludicrous notions argue that the world's sole remaining superpower has every right to protect itself from its enemies. They are correct in the strictest sense, but this is not about self-defense: It is about counterproductive aggression. Washington's strategy can only result in the replacing of one unfriendly regime, or two, or three, with dozens more -- not to mention the non-state actors who will be motivated to conduct more of the asymmetrical warfare that America is so ill-equipped to combat.

 

Likewise, supporters of the Bush Doctrine argue that the post-Cold War world requires a "policeman" to maintain balance, and that America's bona fides as a democracy entitle it to the benefit of the doubt. There is no question that the world is better off with the United States as its most powerful country than would have been the case if the Soviet Union had prevailed in the Cold War. That is a far cry, though, from accepting the desirability of a "new world order" in which America, democratic or not, goes around grinding other nations into the dust with diplomatic pressure, economic sanctions, and outright invasion.

 

The favorite card of dedicated Bush supporters is that those who criticize Washington's strategy are "anti-American." Please. While there is such a thing as knee-jerk anti-Americanism and its adherents are no doubt against current U.S. policy, that is not the same as saying that any and all opposition to the Bush administration can be written off as the product of biased minds bent on undermining the security of the United States. On the contrary, many of the most important arguments against the war in Iraq and against the Bush Doctrine in general are predicated on an earnest desire to shield America and Americans from the inevitable results of that misguided venture and the philosophy that inspired it.

 

In short, the "anti-American" charge is a hiding place for those whose arguments are manifestly not supported by the facts. Far from being able to hunt, that dog won't even get off the porch: It barks a lot, but suffers from undescended testicles.

 

[Marc Sirois is a Canadian journalist who lives in Beirut, Lebanon, where he serves as managing editor of The Daily Star. The proud and fanatically protective father of three beautiful princesses, his opinionated writing style owes to the fact that he is never wrong along with his holding monopolies on wisdom, logic, morality, and justice. He is also exceedingly modest.]

[Thoth]

It's nice to see, again, that no matter what the U.S. does people always like to criticize america. No matter who we try to help, someone always says we have some hidden agenda. As an american, we don't forget what our government has done in our name. Some americans have protested, demonstrated, and even died trying to change the things that they felt were wrong. We know that we don't always do the right thing, that we have supported the wrong people, and that we have killed innocent civilians. What so many others seem to think is that we don't know any of this. We know and we don't forget. What we try to do is forgive, and this is our problem. What we have now found out is that many other countries, people, and groups don't. More to the point is that Somalia, like numerous other countries can't let the past stay in the past, and learn from it. We as americans try to live a joyous and wonderful life. We don't know alot of the things that the CIA, FBI, or our government has done. Yet for some reason we are held accountable for those things. I am not making excuses for my country. I have seen many others around this great planet, and truely believe that this is the best country on this planet. I am not bashing any of you who posted before, but please. If you really believe what you posted, let me know. I will post science, history, and facts to show that what was posted before me is only half truths. And if you only want half truths, as Bagdad Bob said " Iraq is still winning the war ".

[Thinkerman]

well Thoth you are making excuses for ur country. So plz enlighten me and everyone else on these half truths that you alledge the some nomads post on here.

 

Give me the 'full picture' that has so far managed to elude myself and indeed the rest of the world. Show me the good deeds of ur country and just give one, just one example of your countrys foreign adventures in the past centuray, indeed since its inception as a super power where it has not acted in the interests of its powerful minorities whilst subjugating the rest of the whole worlds population to poverty and brutual regimes directly sponsering and put them in place indirectly by one of your Various terrorist organisation such as the CIA.

 

Plz am waiting egarly for ur history and science lesson.

 

And whilst i wait ........why dont u take on board the following article and explain whether the argument of the political writer Naomi Klein is also a concuction of half truths aswell.

 

---------------------------------------------------------------

 

Bomb before you buy Bomb before you buy

 

 

What is being planned in Iraq is not reconstruction but robbery

 

Naomi Klein

Monday April 14, 2003

The Guardian

 

On April 6, deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz spelled it out: there will be no role for the UN in setting up an interim government in Iraq. The US-run regime will last at least six months, "probably longer than that". And by the time the Iraqi people have a say in choosing a government, the key economic decisions about their country's future will have been made by their occupiers. "There has to be an effective administration from day one," Wolfowitz said. "People need water and food and medicine, and the sewers have to work, the electricity has to work. And that's coalition responsibility."

The process of how they will get all this infrastructure to work is usually called "reconstruction". But American plans for Iraq's future economy go well beyond that. Rather than rebuilding, the country is being treated as a blank slate on which the most ideological Washington neo-liberals can design their dream economy: fully privatised, foreign-owned and open for business.

 

The $4.8m management contract for the port in Umm Qasr has already gone to a US company, Stevedoring Services, and there are similar deals for airport administration on the auction block. The United States Agency for International Development has invited US multinationals to bid on everything from rebuilding roads and bridges to distributing textbooks. The length of time these contracts will last is left unspecified. How long before they meld into long-term contracts for water services, transit systems, roads, schools and phones? When does reconstruction turn into privatisation in disguise?

 

Republican congressman Darrel Issa has introduced a bill that would require the defence department to build a CDMA cellphone system in postwar Iraq in order to benefit "US patent holders". As Farhad Manjoo noted in the internet magazine Salon, CDMA is the system used in the US, not in Europe, and was developed by Qualcomm, one of Issa's most generous donors.

 

Then there's oil. The Bush administration knows it can't talk openly about selling Iraq's oil resources to ExxonMobil and Shell. It leaves that to people like Fadhil Chalabi, a former Iraqi petroleum minister and executive director of the Center for Global Energy Studies. "We need to have a huge amount of money coming into the country. The only way is to partially privatise the industry," Chalabi says.

 

He is part of a group of Iraqi exiles that has been advising the state department on how to implement privatisation in such a way that it isn't seen to be coming from the US. Helpfully, the group held a conference in London on April 6 and called on Iraq to open itself up to oil multinationals shortly after the war. The Bush administration has shown its gratitude by promising that there will plenty of posts for Iraqi exiles in the interim government.

 

Some argue that it's too simplistic to say this war is about oil. They're right. It's about oil, water, roads, trains, phones, ports and drugs. And if this process isn't halted, "free Iraq" will be the most sold country on earth.

 

It's no surprise that so many multinationals are lunging for Iraq's untapped market. It's not just that the reconstruction will be worth as much as $100bn; it's also that "free trade" by less violent means hasn't been going that well lately. More and more developing countries are rejecting privatisation, while the Free Trade Area of the Americas, Bush's top trade priority, is wildly unpopular across Latin America. World Trade Organisation talks on intellectual property, agriculture and services have all got bogged down amid accusations that the US and Europe have yet to make good on past promises.

 

So what is a recessionary, growth-addicted superpower to do? How about upgrading from Free Trade Lite, which wrestles market access through backroom bullying at the WTO, to Free Trade Supercharged, which seizes new markets on the battlefields of pre-emptive wars? After all, negotiations with sovereign countries can be hard. Far easier to just tear up the country, occupy it, then rebuild it the way you want. Bush hasn't abandoned free trade, as some have claimed, he just has a new doctrine: "Bomb before you buy".

 

It goes much further than one unlucky country. Investors are openly predicting that once privatisation takes root in Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will all be forced to compete by privatising their oil. "In Iran, it would just catch like wildfire," S Rob Sobhani, an energy consultant, told the Wall Street Journal. Pretty soon, the US may have bombed its way into a whole new free trade zone.

 

So far, the press debate over the reconstruction of Iraq has focused on fair play: it is "exceptionally maladroit", in the words of the European Union's commissioner for external relations, Chris Patten, for the US to keep all the juicy contracts for itself. It has to learn to share: Exxon should invite France's TotalFinaElf to the most lucrative oil fields; Bechtel should give Britain's Thames Water a shot at the sewer contracts.

 

But while Patten may find US unilateralism galling, and Tony Blair may be calling for UN oversight, on this matter it's beside the point. Who cares which multinationals get the best deals in Iraq's pre-democracy, post-Saddam liquidation sale? What does it matter if the privatising is done unilaterally by the US, or multilaterally by the US, Europe, Russia and China?

 

Entirely absent from this debate are the Iraqi people, who might - who knows? - want to hold on to a few of their assets. Iraq will be owed massive reparations after the bombing stops, but in the absence of any kind of democratic process, what is being planned is not reparations, reconstruction or rehabilitation. It is robbery: mass theft disguised as charity; privatisation without representation.

 

A people, starved and sickened by sanctions, then pulverised by war, is going to emerge from this trauma to find that their country had been sold out from under them. They will also discover that their new-found "freedom" - for which so many of their loved ones perished - comes pre-shackled by irreversible economic decisions that were made in boardrooms while the bombs were still falling. They will then be told to vote for their new leaders, and welcomed to the wonderful world of democracy.

 

· Naomi Klein's latest book is Fences and Windows (Flamingo). A version of this article first appeared in the Nation

 

www.nologo.org

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------

[Thinkerman]

I see you have shyied away from given me an answer lol. I Can understand way so dont sweat.

 

Robert Fisk: A civilisation torn to pieces

 

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2908.htm

 

 

Baghdad, reports Robert Fisk, is a city at war with itself, at the mercy of thieves and gunmen. And, in the city's most important museum, something truly terrible has taken place

 

13 April 2003

 

They lie across the floor in tens of thousands of pieces, the priceless antiquities of Iraq's history. The looters had gone from shelf to shelf, systematically pulling down the statues and pots and amphorae of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Medes, the Persians and the Greeks and hurling them on to the concrete.

 

Our feet crunched on the wreckage of 5,000-year-old marble plinths and stone statuary and pots that had endured every siege of Baghdad, every invasion of Iraq throughout history ­ only to be destroyed when America came to "liberate" the city. The Iraqis did it. They did it to their own history, physically destroying the evidence of their own nation's thousands of years of civilisation.

 

Not since the Taliban embarked on their orgy of destruction against the Buddhas of Bamiyan and the statues in the museum of Kabul ­ perhaps not since the Second World War or earlier ­ have so many archaeological treasures been wantonly and systematically smashed to pieces.

 

"This is what our own people did to their history," the man in the grey gown said as we flicked our torches yesterday across the piles of once perfect Sumerian pots and Greek statues, now headless, armless, in the storeroom of Iraq's National Archaeological Museum. "We need the American soldiers to guard what we have left. We need the Americans here. We need policemen." But all that the museum guard, Abdul-Setar Abdul-Jaber, experienced yesterday was gun battles between looters and local residents, the bullets hissing over our heads outside the museum and skittering up the walls of neighbouring apartment blocks. "Look at this," he said, picking up a massive hunk of pottery, its delicate patterns and beautifully decorated lips coming to a sudden end where the jar ­ perhaps 2ft high in its original form ­ had been smashed into four pieces. "This was Assyrian." The Assyrians ruled almost 2,000 years before Christ.

 

And what were the Americans doing as the new rulers of Baghdad? Why, yesterday morning they were recruiting Saddam Hussein's hated former policemen to restore law and order on their behalf. The last army to do anything like this was Mountbatten's force in South-east Asia, which employed the defeated Japanese army to control the streets of Saigon ­ with their bayonets fixed ­ after the recapture of Indo-China in 1945.

 

A queue of respectably dressed Baghdad ex-cops formed a queue outside the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad after they heard a radio broadcast calling for them to resume their "duties" on the streets. In the late afternoon, at least eight former and very portly senior police officers, all wearing green uniforms ­ the same colour as the uniforms of the Iraqi Baath party ­ turned up to offer their services to the Americans, accompanied by a US Marine. But there was no sign that any of them would be sent down to the Museum of Antiquity.

 

But "liberation" has already turned into occupation. Faced by a crowd of angry Iraqis in Firdos Square demanding a new Iraqi government "for our protection and security and peace", US Marines, who should have been providing that protection, stood shoulder to shoulder facing them, guns at the ready. The reality, which the Americans ­ and, of course, Mr Rumsfeld ­ fail to understand is that under Saddam Hussein, the poor and deprived were always the Shia Muslims, the middle classes always the Sunnis, just as Saddam himself was a Sunni. So it is the Sunnis who are now suffering plunder at the hands of the Shia.

 

And so the gun-fighting that broke out yesterday between property owners and looters was, in effect, a conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims. By failing to end this violence ­ by stoking ethnic hatred through their inactivity ­ the Americans are now provoking a civil war in Baghdad.

 

Yesterday evening, I drove through the city for more than an hour. Hundreds of streets are now barricaded off with breeze blocks, burnt cars and tree trunks, watched over by armed men who are ready to kill strangers who threaten their homes or shops. Which is just how the civil war began in Beirut in 1975.

 

A few US Marine patrols did dare to venture into the suburbs yesterday ­ positioning themselves next to hospitals which had already been looted ­ but fires burnt across the city at dusk for the third consecutive day. The municipality building was blazing away last night, and on the horizon other great fires were sending columns of smoke miles high into the air.

 

Too little, too late. Yesterday, a group of chemical engineers and water purification workers turned up at the US Marine headquarters, pleading for protection so they could return to their jobs. Electrical supply workers came along, too. But Baghdad is already a city at war with itself, at the mercy of gunmen and thieves.

 

There is no electricity in Baghdad ­ as there is no water and no law and no order ­ and so we stumbled in the darkness of the museum basement, tripping over toppled statues and stumbling into broken winged bulls. When I shone my torch over one far shelf, I drew in my breath. Every pot and jar ­ "3,500 BC" it said on one shelf corner ­ had been bashed to pieces.

 

Why? How could they do this? Why, when the city was already burning, when anarchy had been let loose ­ and less than three months after US archaeologists and Pentagon officials met to discuss the country's treasures and put the Baghdad Archaeological Museum on a military data-base ­ did the Americans allow the mobs to destroy the priceless heritage of ancient Mesopotamia? And all this happened while US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, was sneering at the press for claiming that anarchy had broken out in Baghdad.

 

For well over 200 years, Western and local archaeologists have gathered up the remnants of this centre of early civilisation from palaces, ziggurats and 3,000-year-old graves. Their tens of thousands of handwritten card index files ­ often in English and in graceful 19th-century handwriting ­ now lie strewn amid the broken statuary. I picked up a tiny shard. "Late 2nd century, no. 1680" was written in pencil on the inside.

 

To reach the storeroom, the mobs had broken through massive steel doors, entering from a back courtyard and heaving statues and treasures to cars and trucks.

 

The looters had left only a few hours before I arrived and no one ­ not even the museum guard in the grey gown ­ had any idea how much they had taken. A glass case that had once held 40,000-year-old stone and flint objects had been smashed open. It lay empty. No one knows what happened to the Assyrian reliefs from the royal palace of Khorsabad, nor the 5,000-year-old seals nor the 4,500-year-old gold leaf earrings once buried with Sumerian princesses. It will take decades to sort through what they have left, the broken stone torsos, the tomb treasures, the bits of jewellery glinting amid the piles of smashed pots.

 

The mobs who came here ­ Shia Muslims, for the most part, from the hovels of Saddam City ­ probably had no idea of the value of the pots or statues. Their destruction appears to have been the result of ignorance as much as fury. In the vast museum library, only a few books ­ mostly mid-19th-century archaeological works ­ appeared to have been stolen or destroyed. Looters set little value in books.

 

I found a complete set of the Geographical Journal from 1893 to 1936 still intact ­ lying next to them was a paperback entitled Baghdad, The City of Peace ­ but thousands of card index sheets had been flung from their boxes over stairwells and banisters.

 

British, French and German archaeologists played a leading role in the discovery of some of Iraq's finest treasures. The great British Arabist, diplomatic schemer and spy Gertrude Bell, the "uncrowned queen of Iraq" whose tomb lies not far away from the museum, was an enthusiastic supporter of their work. The Germans built the modern-day museum beside the Tigris river and only in 2000 was it reopened to the public after nine years of closure following the 1991 Gulf War.

 

Even as the Americans encircled Baghdad, Saddam Hussein's soldiers showed almost the same contempt for its treasures as the looters. Their slit trenches and empty artillery positions are still clearly visible in the museum lawns, one of them dug beside a huge stone statue of a winged bull.

 

Only a few weeks ago, Jabir Khalil Ibrahim, the director of Iraq's State Board of Antiquities, referred to the museum's contents as "the heritage of the nation". They were, he said, "not just things to see and enjoy ­ we get strength from them to look to the future. They represent the glory of Iraq".

 

Mr Ibrahim has vanished, like so many government employees in Baghdad, and Mr Abdul-Jaber and his colleagues are now trying to defend what is left of the country's history with a collection of Kalashnikov rifles. "We don't want to have guns, but everyone must have them now," he told me. "We have to defend ourselves because the Americans have let this happen. They made a war against one man ­ so why do they abandon us to this war and these criminals?"

 

Half an hour later, I contacted the civil affairs unit of the US Marines in Saadun Street and gave them the exact location of the museum and the condition of its contents. A captain told me that "we're probably going to get down there". Too late. Iraq's history had already been trashed by the looters whom the Americans unleashed on the city during their "liberation".

 

"You are American!" a woman shouted at me in English yesterday morning, wrongly assuming I was from the US. "Go back to your country. Get out of here. You are not wanted here. We hated Saddam and now we are hating Bush because he is destroying our city." It was a mercy she could not visit the Museum of Antiquity to see for herself that the very heritage of her country ­ as well as her city ­ has been destroyed.

[Thoth]

Shujui-Moja

 

It is obvious from your post that followed mine, that you have not learned from world history or have taken the time to research current events with an open mind. I will address a couple of your points here, so you can see that.

 

#1. You asked who have we helped in the past century? How about every allied country in WWI or WWII. Look at what caused the wars, what became of the axis powers after the wars, and the part of the U.S. governments and military played in each. Do you know the difference in the history of East and West Germany? How about WWII Japan and the current Japan? How about the Korean conflict? Can you see any difference between North and South Korea today? If you don't just let me know I'll send you some internet sites you can visit to gain knowledge in these areas.

 

#2. If you like, I will give you a second side to the story that you took the time to simply copy. If Naomi Klein really believes that everything can be fixed overnight, than Klein must be crazy. Does Klein think that the U.S. in 30 days or less can fix the things like sewers, phone lines, cable, water, electric, power, and oil lines that Saddam destroyed over 25 years? Even more to the point, do you? Where does Klein even mention that if the U.S. waited for the world to set up a system to see who should be allowed to rebuild Iraq that millions of Iraqs would be without water, power, food, and those other items I listed. How many Iraq's would die without those items, and who would Klein and you blame? Of course I already know that you would blame the U.S. The contracts awarded NEED to be done now, and since we are in Iraq, we are not taking the time to see how many more Iraq's will die. Sorry to disappoint you or Klein, but we do care about the Iraq people. We want things fixed now and will not stand by why companies fight over contracts. Klein printed a story, and made the facts appear to support what side she choose. I don't know if Klein is male or female, sorry if I am wrong in that assumption. If you believe that facts cannot be twisted to support one side of a story then you know not of propaganda.

 

3. I did not say that some of the things said, and copied are not true, my problem is they are only half of the story. I wonder why your posts only show what appears to be the negative side of the war and the U.S.? Do not be deceived so easily. Even a blind man can see the light.

 

http://edition.cnn.com/

[Gediid]

Quote

 

Then there's oil. The Bush administration knows it can't talk openly about selling Iraq's oil resources to ExxonMobil and Shell. It leaves that to people like Fadhil Chalabi, a former Iraqi petroleum minister and executive director of the Center for Global Energy Studies. "We need to have a huge amount of money coming into the country. The only way is to partially privatise the industry," Chalabi says.

 

Ironically Iraq was the only nation among the Arab nations that had exclusive ownership of its Oil.All the other members of the Opec club jointly own and operate with Western oil congolomerates.I guess this means Chevron,Exxon or who ever they sell it to will get what they longed dreamed of.

[Thinkerman]

Am not one for parroting things but u might read what gediid said and take it on boad saxiib

 

Explain to me this. How is bombing a country into oblivion helping it. How is standing idealy by when its collective history (which is the oldest in the history of man) is looted like cheap irrelevant stuff.?? can u just explain to me how exactly this is helping the iraq ppl??

 

 

It is obvious from your post that followed mine, that you have not learned from world history or have taken the time to research current events with an open mind. I will address a couple of your points here, so you can see that.

I would argue quite the opposite Throt. It is you who obviously havent followed the events that hvae been unfolding for the past 3 years without an open mind and close scrutiny to what your administartion has been saying and plotting and planning for the world and the regimes to which the are against.

 

I usual go to even greater lengths than simply presenting dissenting views from eminent writers on what ever subject that is being debated. However it ws patently clear to me that you are of the neo-conservative persuation when u said (quite inslustingly)

No matter who we try to help, someone always says we have some hidden agenda.

PLZZZZZZZZZZZZ i mean d i need to state the obvious?? K i give you credit for at least giving some evidence (The Marshal plan for the reconstruction of europe )for your absurd assertion. But what happened in WW11 cannot be compared to the military adventures of this current era.

And if u where so keen to help the iraq ppl why did you administration back in 1991 after the iraqis listen to G.Bush seniors call for an intafada (up rising) let them be brutail suppressed by saddam and his regime??

 

You see i do no what the diff between west and east germany where and what the diff are between the north and south of korea........ i might add the both are a direct result of your countries meddling in. Back then under the guise of fighting against the 'evil empire' (SOVIET UNION) and communism u country amnaged to attack the people of vietnam with agent orange and yet it still retained its moral high ground about saddam gassing his own ppl in his own version of chemical attack (which incedentally were provided by america) WOW great work america u really helped the worldf alot in this last centuary

 

Now to answer some question u posed directly to me

 

 

You asked

 

1.Does Klein think that the U.S. in 30 days or less can fix the things like sewers, phone lines, cable, water, electric, power, and oil lines that Saddam destroyed over 25 years? Even more to the point, do you

 

Nope clearly not........i might add they wopuld be no need to rebuild them had they not been bomed into disintegration.

And whilst your invading military guards stauncly the oil ministry and other 'KEy Interest sites' the standf by idile and let looters steel from any hospital and libarries and other crucial instituation, Wow WHAT GREAT HELP am sure the iraqis' on the ground appreciate that.

 

 

You said

 

3. I did not say that some of the things said, and copied are not true, my problem is they are only half of the story

 

Granted u did imply that they were not true, which is just as bad as saying it out right. And if they are half truths then plz like i stated before (interestingly u still have refused to provide me with the history and science lesson) provide me with the information that your are viewing ot are they, like your administrations top secret intelligence reports on iraq sites of WMD, only for your viewing??

 

 

Hey tell you until u can come back to me with a more comprehemsive answer backed up with authorities form history recent or past of america acting as a benian force you should read more into these thruths that u view as 'half thruths' coz u never no the might actually teh full picture.

 

So in the mean time why dont u chew on this next offering and read it this time k. And explain to me how in hell by keeping military bases in iraq america wants to help iraq's. Perhaps they also want to help Iran and Syria?

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

US 'to keep bases in Iraq'

 

David Teather in New York and Ian Traynor

Monday April 21, 2003

The Guardian

 

The US is planning a long-term military presence in Iraq, in a move which will dramatically extend American power in the region and spread dismay and fear among its opponents across the Arab world.

According to reports, the Pentagon intends to retain four military bases in Iraq after the invasion force withdraws. It is already using the bases to support continuing operations against pockets of resistance. They are at the international airport near Baghdad, at Talil; close to the city of Nassiriya in the south; at an isolated airstrip called H-1 in the western desert; and at the Bashur airfield in the Kurdish north.

 

A senior administration official told the New York Times: "There will be some kind of a long term defence relationship with Iraq, similar to Afghanistan. The scope of that has yet to be defined - whether it will be full-up operational bases, smaller forward operating bases or just plain access."

 

The plans would be eyed nervously by neighbouring Syria and by Iran, a member of President George Bush's "axis of evil", now facing American-backed governments along two sides of its border. "This is a nightmare unfolding for both Syria and Iran," Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at the University of Warwick, said.

 

A sign that Syria may be trying to halt the deterioration in its links with the US came at the weekend when Saddam's son-in-law and member of his inner circle, Jamal Mustafa Sultan Abdullah al-Tikriti, returned from Damascus to surrender to the Iraqi National Congress in Baghdad.

 

The Bush administration has warned Syria not to harbour members of Saddam's regime. It claims Syria also sponsors terrorism.

 

A permanent US military foothold in Iraq would profoundly change the political make-up of the Middle East. Part of its attraction is that it would offer the US an alternative to Saudi Arabia, which was reluctant to cooperate on Iraq and is viewed by American officials as a breeding ground for terrorism after the revelation that 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11 were from the kingdom.

 

The plans could leave the White House open to the charges of empire-building that it has been so desperate to avoid. As in Afghanistan, it is likely to keep the number of deployed troops to a minimum with the guarantee of access to the bases should they be needed. But it is a difficult balance to achieve. If the US is seen to be deepening its presence in the region it could spur on Islamist extremists.

 

"This will be an alarming step to most of the Middle East," said Abdul Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi. "It seems they want to control the whole region."

 

The Pentagon declined to comment yesterday but the bases are expected to be accompanied by a reduction in the US military presence in Saudi Arabia.

 

Marcus Corbin, of the Centre for Defence Information in Washington, said he expected the Pentagon to try to keep its options open in Saudi Arabia, but to have a much smaller and less visible presence there. The Pentagon has also been reducing its presence in Turkey.

 

With Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran as neighbours, Iraq is strategically in a prime location. "Geographically, Iraq is ideal for the Americans," Mr Dodge said.

 

The bases plan comes in addition to the vast expansion of the US military which has taken place elsewhere across the Middle East and central Asia in the past two years, most of it in Muslim states

 

Washington's success in persuading countries from Romania to Kyrgyzstan to host its military bases is a reflection of the new era ushered in by September 11. "The military always likes to have bases and the ability to move to bases at short notice. What's new is the opportunities," said Mr Corbin.

 

The establishment of US military bases would increase the pressure on Syria to fall into line with the Americans.

[Thinkerman]

A war that ends with the victory of the aggressor is worse than a war that ends with their defeat. It is more destructive, both physically and morally.

 

Operation - Syrian Freedom

4/20/2003 - Political - Article Ref: IV0304-1940

By: Uri Avnery

Iviews* -

 

 

 

Victory justifies nothing. No victory justifies an evil war. Quite the opposite. It just adds to the evil.

 

With the entry of American forces into Baghdad, opposition to the war in the US and Britain is dwindling. In other countries, too, doubts are starting to nibble away at the anti-war camp.

 

I find this difficult to understand.

 

Let's pose the question in the most provocative manner: what would have happened if Adolf Hitler had triumphed in World War II? Would this have turned his war into a just one?

 

Let's assume that Hitler would have indicted his enemies at the Nuremberg war crimes court: Churchill for the terrible air raid on Dresden, Truman for dropping the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Stalin for murdering millions in the Gulag camps. Would the historians have regarded this as a just war?

 

A war that ends with the victory of the aggressor is worse than a war that ends with their defeat. It is more destructive, both physically and morally.

 

On the eve of the Iraq war, world public opinion found its voice as never before. This world reaction was an immensely valuable moral victory. On it the future must be built. The flame must not be allowed to die down. It must flare up into a blaze again.

 

It can't be stopped. Let me repeat the Israeli joke: "It is difficult to prophesy, especially about the future."

 

But this time, the prophesies have come true so quickly, that even the "prophets" themselves are stunned.

 

After the American onslaught on Afghanistan, we said in these columns: You can't stop a military machine that has achieved such a quick and complete victory with so few losses. It will push for action again and again.

 

We said: the band of zealots which is in control of Washington cannot stop now, just as Napoleon and Hitler could not stop. Their inner logic will push them to attack again and again.

 

On the eve of the attack on Iraq we said: after this, the next targets will be Syria and Iran.

 

And here it comes. The shooting in Baghdad had not yet ended, while the first steps towards the attack on Syria were already being taken.

 

Again the same outcry: "They have chemical weapons!" (And so have the Unites States, Russia, Egypt, Israel, Britain, France and many others. Every military machine develops these weapons, even for defensive purposes.) "There is a brutal dictator out there!" "He supports terrorism!"

 

In a few days, we shall hear: "He butchered his own people as Saddam did with his Kurds!" (His father sure did. Assad Sr. shelled the town of Hama while bloodily putting down an Islamist rebellion.) "We must liberate the poor Syrian people from the tyrant!" And from there: "Regime change!"

 

It will begin with slogans, "warnings", speeches in the UN and sanctions. The most expert professionals will prepare public opinion. The American and world media (with the Israelis to the fore) will eagerly cooperate. And then the war will become "inevitable".

 

It already has a name: "Operation Syrian Freedom.

 

Americans for the Golan. There is one important difference between "Iraqi Freedom" and "Syrian Freedom".

 

The American attack on Iraq had many objectives: control of the oil, creation of a permanent American base in the heart of the Arab world, revenge for the failure of the father. Furthering Sharon's interests was only one objective, and as long as Sharon kept quiet, it wasn't too obvious.

 

The coming American attack on Syria is quite different. It does not serve any major American interest, but it does serve (and how!) the interests of Sharon.

 

For those who have forgotten the developments, here is a brief reminder:

 

In 1967, after Syrian-Egyptian threats, the Israeli army attacked Syria (after Egypt and Jordan) and conquered the Golan Heights, which until that time were known in Israel as "the Syrian Heights". Their 160 thousand inhabitants fled (they vegetate to this day as refugees in Syria.) Their land was taken over by Israeli settlers. The Likud government has officially annexed the Heights (but not the West Bank and Gaza Strip) to Israel.

 

From that time, the liberation of the Golan has become a central aim for Syria. According to international law, this is occupied Syrian territory. Two Israeli Prime Ministers, Yitzhaq Rabin and Ehud Barak, as much as admitted this when they agreed to return all the Golan to Syria. The negotiations broke down in each case because of an argument about a few hundred meters. Neither Rabin nor Barak was ready to allow the Assads to "wet their feet in the sea of Tiberias".

 

The two lions (In Arabic, Assad means lion) acted very cautiously. After the father's failed to dislodge the Israeli army in the October 1973 war, they did not use their own military again. They found a way to fight by proxy: the Lebanese Hizbullah militia has harassed the Israeli army with pinpricks. Both Assads hoped that this would help them to get the Golan back in the end. Also, some of the Palestinian pro-Syrian (i.e. anti-Arafat) organizations are based in Damascus.

 

Now along comes the Bush administration, under the influence of Wolfowitz, Perle & Co., and issues an ultimatum to the Syrians: give up your chemical weapons, eliminate Hizbullah, get rid of the "terrorists".

 

For the Syrians this means, in effect, to give up any hope of ever getting the Golan Heights back. It also means American recognition of their annexation by Israel, in contravention of all the UN resolutions and the position of every US president up to now.

 

Without Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, the threat of "the Eastern front" that has been haunting the Israeli military for decades will disappear. Egypt and Jordan have already signed peace treaties. Sharon will be able to concentrate all his might against the Palestinians, who will remain alone.

 

Moral insanity. Sometimes, the entire character of a person is encapsulated in one single word of theirs. This happened last week to Donald Rumsfeld.

 

The world saw the terrible pictures of what's happening in Baghdad under the eyes of the occupation forces. Baghdad was ransacked as in the days of the Mongols. The mob did not plunder only the government buildings, without which no modern society can function, but also hospitals and museums. The wounded and the sick were left without life-saving equipment and medicines. Priceless cultural treasures from the cradle of human civilization were destroyed or plundered - one of the worst cultural disasters in the history of mankind.

 

The absolute responsibility for this outrage, which has been going on for more than a week, day after day, falls on the occupier. That is what international law says, in agreement with common sense. It shows the total indifference of the planners of the war for the population they were about to "liberate". No provisions had been made to protect them from the anarchy that is to be expected when any regime collapses, no preparations for safeguarding vital public buildings and cultural treasures. A city of many millions was turned over to the mob.

 

When Rumsfeld was asked about it, the man who is responsible for this catastrophe dismissively: "When a regime falls, there is always some untidiness." Untidiness! One word that speaks volumes. About the man himself.

 

Pity the settlers. Years ago, my wife and I were traveling in the west of Czechoslovakia. It was a dark, bitterly cold winter night. Suddenly, Rachel's eyes were caught by a small house, at some distance from the road, where a red light picked out a small area of snow, surrounded by utter darkness. She asked me to stop the car and struggled through the deep snow to take some pictures.

 

While she was busy taking photos, the door of the house burst open and a disheveled woman in dressing gown and slippers came running out. "What do you want? What are you doing here?" she demanded in a panic.

 

Rachel explained that she was a tourist and that the beautiful sight had captured her imagination. Gradually, the woman relaxed.

 

"I was afraid you were Germans who wanted to reclaim the house," she apologized.

 

She was a Czech from another part of the country, who as a child had moved with her family in this house after the German population had been thrown out at the end of World War II. Fifty years later, she was still living in constant fear.

 

I was reminded of this when I read about the Iraqi-Arab settlers, who had been brought by Saddam to Kirkuk and settled there in order to Arabize the Kurdish town. Many of the Kurdish inhabitants had been driven out. A foreign journalist happened to come across some of these Arabs in the middle of nowhere. They had fled their homes in sheer panic, in fear of Kurdish revenge. They asked the foreigner to bring the American soldiers to protect them.

 

Food for thought for our settlers.

 

 

 

Uri Avnery is an Israeli journalist, peace activist and a former member of the Knesset

[Thoth]

Shujui-1

 

It is obvious from your posts, that no matter what I say you will not understand. You say you understand the differences, yet you still blame the U.S. for them. For some reason all you seem to do is blame the U.S. for the problems. When people read your posts and mine, one thing should be obvious. I can say that the U.S. has done things wrong, but we have also done things right. I only see you attempting to lay blame on the U.S. for numerous things. Any debate with you would be pointless. You have made your decision and no matter what proof is offered you are blind to the truth. What has blinded you I do not know, but I do have some idea.

[Thoth]

Shujui-1

 

 

I'll post these, maybe you and others will read them.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2144421.stm

 

http://projects.sipri.se/cbw/research/factsheet-1984.html

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/august/2/newsid_2526000/2526937.stm

 

http://www.yahoodi.com/peace/sixdaywar.html

 

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2970199.stm

[Thinkerman]

:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

 

Unfortunately you replies once again leaves me even more dissappointed than before. Whilst i put forward plasuable wide spread well accepted critisms of america and its foriegn policy you answer whimsically and emotionaly.

 

Quite frankly the topic i had hoped would have attract more contributors than just the three so far (Inc myself) and it has become a tit for tat exchange on your part.

 

I have said all i need to said earlier and your have indeed turned out to be one of those who hold the same views such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

 

Quite laughably you attempt to try to further establish what i can only discribe as more excuses on the part of success administartions of your countries by posting a selection of quite ridiculous links

 

 

Is this all that takes to satisfy you?? lol what a joke. And you expect me to read something from a link called Yahoodi etc etc plzzzzzzzzz.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2144421.stm

 

http://projects.sipri.se/cbw/research/factsheet-1984.html

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/august/2/newsid_2526000/2526937.stm

 

http://www.yahoodi.com/peace/sixdaywar.html

 

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2970199.stm

 

Get with the facts america is to blame for attacting Iraq, America is the one to blame for Sept 11 (go an investigate if your really interested), For supporting Israels continued brutual suppression of the Palestinans, For Droping 2 Nuclear weapons on Japan, for imposing sanctions on cuba for over 4 decades...........i can go on indefinately.

 

Your country is not a help to the world, world peace or stability. It is a 'super power' militarly, economically and it could be of great help to the world if it sincerely acted as a benian force.

 

But because its not ruled by true democratic prinicple that is so aspaoses every day but rather various lobby groups i.e. multi-national corporations such as exxon, by The Pro Israel lobby, by the zionist and christian right, it will continue on its path of double standards and subjugation of other countries people and regions if it is in the interets of its economy and strategic goals.

 

So plz cut the crap coz your non sensical attempt of persuading me or indeed any other person on this forum is Just not washing. alright cheesers

[Thoth]

When I first made my post, it was simple, because it is a way for me to determine the extent of your knowledge, understanding, and beliefs. I quickly came to the realization that no matter what facts I brought out, you truely do not understand. It is a waste of my time to debate issues with someone who won't admit the truth to things that they don't agree with. You have proven to be just another person blinded by ignorence. Even a blind man can see the light, too bad you can't.

[Thinkerman]

:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

 

I give up . Its obvious that you are unable or perhaps unwilling to engage in this debate with an open mind. And you have consistently dogged my replies. So unless u come foward with a good article for me to read, or indeed just state why you regard what i am reading are just half truths i will ignore your responses as your quite clearly not interested in exploring any critisms of your countries past and present actions.

 

You have acussed me of being blind to the truth :rolleyes: i shall say no more.

 

Hey perhaps you should watch Bowlling for Colombian by Micheal Moore instead of getting frustrated with convincing more with your nonsense.

[La Fidele]

Well, I don't know why I'm adding my input to this, considering this discussion has pretty much been concluded.

Shujui, I commend you for posting this topic in the first place. Yes, being the lone military superpower, it's in America's interests to flex their muscle once in a while. Apparantly, there's a pattern for every American president to engage in one war per term. Two is stretching it (and obviously I don't consider Afghanistan in this equation), and that's why some argue the US is backing off of those Syria threats (remember them?)...but anyways, getting off topic!

What I really want to say: Shujui, by just reading halfway down the postings of you and Thoth, I noticed you were investing more into this debate than your counter-part! And when Thoth finally contributed links, I believe he/she revealed more about him/herself than was intended. You shouldn't feel so frustrated, considering this was never a balanced debate anyway

And Thoth, what were your intentions in including the Six Day War amongst the links? I fail to see how that advances your argument for the US, and not Israel.

Salaam Alaikum.