sad truths
"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,"-Alan GreenspanInteresting on the attitudes and the racist behavior that still exists when we invade other nations and fuck them up, kill at will and then cry foul "We are the good guys"
READ THIS FIRSThttp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20892483/site/newsweek/
Mercenaries now politically correctly known as "Security Contractors" are a special breed of vermin in any war. They play for money. They are hired by all sorts of bad folks and ostensibly by good folks too. No one seems to give a shit here on the chaos we have caused in Iraq. No one gives a shit that there are two million refugees in Syria and Jordan because of this mad man's war. The man who said "I speak to the higher father", A man blinded by stupid religious fervor is as bad and dangerous to the world as the nutjobs who claim they have a monopoly on virtue to launch holy wars. The rest of the world, sees us as being as dangerous as the terrorists. They see us as being arrogant, unilateralist military adventurers who only want to see the world the way we see it. When we have a leader suffering from delusional behavior it is no surprise that some of you goosestep to his Wagnerian beat.
You think everything everything he says is the Gospel truth.Isolated Americans specially in the conservative heartland claim to be christian, yet they dont seem to care about the chaos utter world wide destabilization caused by us invading Iraq. The terrorists have gathered thousands of recruits because of it. Thousands want to fight us because we are foreign occupying force in Iraq. We can twist it, we can lie and our politicians will misuse and manipulate even honorable Generals to say what they want to hear. But ultimately as my superior experiences show, no matter even if the army is a local army, when it causes civilian casualties and it goes about arrogantly not caring for the people they are supposedly there to protect(read the history of the Indian Army Peace keeping force in Sri Lanka you fools) and (read also how SL army had to change their tactics too), it boomerangs back on us. The rage people feel when they are forced to cower when strangers with guns break their doors and drag their women and children is a world wide phenomena. Be it in N.Ireland for 80 odd years, be it in Sri Lanka or now with our mercenaries in Iraq.
I think the baseline is the racial bigotry and the callousness of people who dont give a shit. I think it is because somehow we think the oil under their sand is only our god given right and therefore I should be able to drive my fucking Cadillac Escalade or my fucking Hummer getting gallons to a mile and sacrificing soldiers per gallon that is causing this indifference. The same sort of indifference that existed before Vietnam spiralled out of control. And now this man wants to start another war? Please read this URl. Specially the ignoramuses who believed every crock of shit manipulated lie in 2003 and wanted to "'kick Arab ass" or the ones who conveniently avoided going to Vietnam when they could but now say "If I were young enough, I would don the uniform and go to Iraq". Please dont insult my limited intelligence.
The world will be far more unstable and we will be open to far more attacks EXACTLY because we invaded and ruined someone else's country on a holier than thou pretext.
All one has to do is look at recent history. The U.S. chemical warfare against the Vietnamese people killed many thousands, and left a legacy of an estimated 500,000 children with serious birth defects (Peter Waldman, “Body Count,” Wall Street Journal, 12 December 1997). Overall, upwards of 3 million people were killed in the U.S.’ counterrevolutionary war on Vietnam, plus another 2 million in neighboring Cambodia and Laos. This horrendous death toll was justified with overtly racist arguments. The commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, claimed that, “The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient” (Far Eastern Economic Review, 21 April 1975). The same grotesque arguments are used by the apologists for the U.S. imperialist invasion of Iraq today.
History of Iraq, Some more facts people should know. . The weak liberal media failed because they didn’t possess a backbone to ask the hard questions prewar. Our media failed us all because they didn’t want to be excoriated as being anti-American post 9/11. They failed because of obeisance to a regime. They failed because they didn’t want to appear unpatriotic in view of intimidating Goebbelsian propaganda from the regime’s right-wing media supporters. To this date, the liberal media ignores that the war in Iraq has caused the biggest refugee crisis in the Middle-East since 1947; there are nearly 2 million innocent Iraqis languishing in camps; most of them in Syria (a country we continue to keep bashing and refusing to talk to). Nearly 4,000 of our soldiers are dead; over twenty six thousand maimed for life. The British Medical journal LANCET estimates over 654,000 excess deaths in Iraq; conservatively nearly 30,000 are dying annually. Iraq has created millions of sympathizers, scores of willing recruits for extremists groups in the Arab world in a country where there wasn’t Al-Qaeda before. Those expressing caution were insulted before March of 2003 and derided by some political parties.
They accused those who knew facts about Iraq by saying they supported terrorism for opposing the invasion. Our media never challenged the leaders; they betrayed democracy more than the government did.However, given that most people view that thick gooey substance that is deposited beneath the Asian sands of Arabia is our God given right to own and control as we deem fit, and because resent the Arabs for having it in such mother lodes, it behooves us to examine some historical facts so that we will not repeat the mistakes of the past again by launching anther attack on the Persian Iran. History is being repeated in Iraq. British troops are finally leaving and limiting them to barracks in the Shia South in Basra. It's their third such departure from Iraq in the past 100 years. Their previous two departures were ignominious, to say the least.
The lies and deception the Blair government resorted to justify its decision to join Bush's war now stand exposed. Blair claimed that Saddam possessed weapons that threatened the security of Britain and the West. He also said that these weapons could be assembled in 45 minutes. Blair's claims were disproved one by one. Dr. David Kelly, a top scientist attached to Britain's Ministry of Defence, allegedly passed information to a BBC reporter, saying that the government had hyped the dossier against Iraq. Kelly knew what he was passing to the media. He did not want to be a part of a war that was not actually Britain's war. But within weeks of the BBC story, Dr. Kelly's body was found in a thicket. The official version was that Dr. Kelly committed suicide.
Britain's links with Iraq harks back to the World War I plot formalized in the form of a secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, under which European imperial powers (read robbers or plunderers) -- Britain and France -- agreed to share West Asia after the Ottoman Turks were defeated. Four years later, in terms of this agreement, Iraq came under Britain, with the League of Nations- providing a veneer of legitimacy. Jordan, Iraq and Palestine came under British mandate whilst France got Syria and Lebanon. Naturally, the Colonial “civilized democracies” didn’t bother to consult the populations of the countries involved. The birth of Iraq was presided over by Winston Churchill , an arrogant, colonialist who to this day is honored as a “statesman” in western histories but his contempt and racist feelings towards non-white nations he ruled was legendary (he called Gandhi a “Half-Nakd Fakir”). In Iraq, the British installed a monarch, brought in from Hijaz, Arabia. His name was Feisal, son of Hussein, Mecca's sheriff, who betrayed the Ottomans and helped Britain during World War I. While Feisal was showcased in a palace, the pro-British Iraqi elite handpicked by the imperialists dominated the government, carrying out orders they got from the British Colonial Office and the British High Commission in Baghdad. When the Iraqis rose against their occupiers, they were brutally suppressed. The colonial officers used chemical weapons or poison gas to silence the resistance forever. At the time Churchill was British secretary of state for the colonies. Churchill gave Feisal the lands formerly known as Mesopotamia, lying between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, as a consolation prize. Repeatedly from 1919 on, the population of what is now Iraq rose up against the Hashemite ruler and his British patrons.In June 1920, a full-scale rebellion broke out. British garrisons were taken by surprise as the revolt spread throughout the lower Euphrates valley. In August, the insurgents declared a provisional Arab government. But by February 1921, the revolt had been crushed, with between 8,000 and 9,000 rebels killed. This was accomplished mainly through the use of air power, by the Royal Air Force (RAF), which mercilessly bombed the insurgents using incendiary weapons and poison gas. Before the outbreak of the rebellion, the RAF asked Churchill in 1919 for permission to use chemical weapons “against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment.” Churchill as secretary of state for war asked experts if it would be possible to use “some kind of asphyxiating bombs calculated to cause disablement of some kind but not death…for use in preliminary operations against turbulent tribes.” He added: “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes” which “spread a lively terror.” General Sir Aylmer Haldane wrote that poison gas was more useful against the hilly Kurdish redoubts, while “in the hot plains…the gas is more volatile” (quoted in Geoff Simmons, Iraq: From Sumer to Saddam [MacMillan Press, 1994]). In fact, the weapons used by the RAF in its “civilizing mission” against the “turbulent tribes” were quite lethal. The British cabinet was squeamish, but Churchill argued that use of gas should not be prevented “by the prejudices of those who do not think clearly.” Eventually, poison gas was used on Iraqi rebels, with what the illustrious “statesman” described as “excellent moral effect” (quoted in David Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control. The Royal Air Force, 1919-1939 [Manchester University Press, 1990]). Today the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, successor to the Colonial Office, professes horror at the suffering of the Kurds under Hussein’s rule, which has “included the use of chemical weapons” (Saddam Hussein: Crimes and Human Rights Abuses [November 2002]). Yet this is the bloody history of the British imperialists who claim to be friends of the Kurds! In March 1917, the commander of the Anglo-Indian Army of the Tigris, Lt.-General Stanley Maude, issued a proclamation upon entering Baghdad declaring that “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators” (Robert Fisk, “The West Has Been Liberating the Middle East for Centuries,” Independent [London], 7 March). This is the fiery hell the Colonial European “liberators” visited on the Iraqi people then. Fast forward history to recent times we all understand; In 1956, Saddam took part in an unsuccessful coup attempt against King Faisal II of Iraq . Two years later, a non-Baathist group led by General Abdul Qassim (or Kassem) overthrew the king. In 1959, Hussein and other Baath supporters tried to assassinate General Qassim. They failed. In 1963, the Baath Party assassinated General Qassim. Hussein returned to Iraq. Saddam’s Baathist party launched a coup and took power in Iraq from the previous military regime in 1966. Hussein became Deputy Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. This put him in charge of internal Iraqi security and gave him the number-two position in the Baath Party.
By 1973, Hussein was vice president of Iraq under benevolent dictator President Al-Bakr. Saddam was the Vice President under a fairly benevolent Al-Bakr until he took over in 1979. We all were happily doing business with all sorts of unsavory elements in the middle-east. Iraq’s economy flush wiuth oil cash was booming, while the US was arming Iran’s dictator, Soviets were arming Iraq(both sides armed and aided many brutal dictators around the world during the cold war as a necessity)and the country was a secular socialist model in a neighbourhood full of oppressive feudal kingdoms backed by us where no one raised concerns about democracy or human rights. Saddam was encouraged to attack Iran in 1980 because of perceived threats from Shia radicals in post Revolutionary Iran, where our puppet Shah was overthrown in 1979 and we lost the critical strategic toehold in Iran. Let us remind those who have constantly changed the rationale for the war against Saddam(he killed his own people) that when Saddam was allegedly killing people and gassing Iranians, Ronald Reagan sided with Iraq and so did others. In fact the crime for which he was tried and hanged happened at a time we actively did business with him! We only remained “neutral” on the surface and we did not care a tuppence about Saddam’s human rights violations then. It was the British and American governments that blocked the Iranian resolution to the UN asking it to censure Saddam.
Ronald Reagan lifted the US State Department ban on Iraq as a nation sponsoring terrorism in 1982. He actively allowed US companies to provide components to Iraq’s chemical weapons program. The US helped Saddam with Fire Directional support, Military trucks, and other materiel help to stymie the Iranianan Shia Islamic revolution from spreading to Iraq. In 1982, the US sent 60 Defender helicopters to Iraq and By 1983,(when most of the massacred occurred) the Reagan government allowed transshipment of arms to Iraq through friendly Arab conduits. In November 1983, our Secretary of State George Schulz raised concerns about Saddam using chemical weapons against civilian populations. In December of that year Donald Rumsfeld met Saddam and assured our government’s friendship and materiel support to Saddam’s regime; it must be noted, that most international human rights organizations(painted as liberal by our conservative politicians in OK) had soundly condemned Saddam and demanded action against him. By 1985, it became obvious Saddam’s incompetent Soviet style Army could not defeat Iran, and he was increasingly being criticized for his horrendous crimes, Ronald Reagan signed a secret order to allow Iranians to buy our weapons so that the stalemate and balance of power in the region would continue.
Our brave young lads fighting and dying there today may not know that Rumsfeld visited Saddam during that time to strike billion dollar deals for Bechtel. If Saddam was repugnant then, why would our government knowingly want to strike deals with one of the most oppressive dictators in the world? Now history shows us in fact George Bush’s war has in fact strengthened radical Shia domination and radical Islamic tendencies in a nation which was secular before that. Al-Qaeda gleefully stepped into the chaos we caused(as predicted) and entrenched themselves and found willing recruits in a place they had no place under Saddam because Saddam hated them and Usama hated Saddam equally and Saddam made sure he would kill anyone who threatened his regime including Islamic terrorists and Shia radicals.All this is now revealed in Congressional records and declassified documents and can no longer be ridiculed as liberal anti-war propaganda. With a quagmire that on average is killing 1800 Iraqi civilians a month, one must wonder if our callous indifference to the civilian casualties are because of our love-hate relationship with the Arab world; a world we never tried to understand or RESPECT, that is critical to our economic and national security interests simply because of what lies beneath their soil; however is our hate because of latent Churchillian tendencies in all of us? Are we viewing those as expendable lives because of racial prejudices? Or is it a repetition of the attitudes displayed during the Vietnam war? According to the Wall Street Journal of 12 Dec 1997, U.S. chemical warfare against the Vietnamese people killed many thousands, and left a legacy of an estimated 500,000 children with serious birth defects; upwards of 3 million people were killed in the U.S.’ anti communist war in Vietnam, plus another 2 million in neighboring Cambodia and Laos. This horrendous death toll was justified with overtly racist arguments. The commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, claimed that, “The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient” (Far Eastern Economic Review, 21 April 1975). Are we still thinking on the same lines?. Liberal western media highlight and re-highlight only Hitler's gassing of the Jews - and since 2003, Saddam' use of poison gas to kill the Kurds of Halabja. Saddam was ousted, hounded and hanged, but the Britsih imperial officers who committed similar war crimes in Iraq faced no trial and made no headlines then. . As Director Brian DePalma says “In Vietnam, when we saw the images and the sorrow of the people we were traumatizing and killing, we saw the soldiers wounded and brought back in body bags. We see none of that in this war." Even to this date most of us don’t seem to know that not a single radical Islamic evil terrorist who attacked us on 9/11 was an Iraqi.
What would Jesus do?
READ THIS FIRSThttp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20892483/site/newsweek/
Mercenaries now politically correctly known as "Security Contractors" are a special breed of vermin in any war. They play for money. They are hired by all sorts of bad folks and ostensibly by good folks too. No one seems to give a shit here on the chaos we have caused in Iraq. No one gives a shit that there are two million refugees in Syria and Jordan because of this mad man's war. The man who said "I speak to the higher father", A man blinded by stupid religious fervor is as bad and dangerous to the world as the nutjobs who claim they have a monopoly on virtue to launch holy wars. The rest of the world, sees us as being as dangerous as the terrorists. They see us as being arrogant, unilateralist military adventurers who only want to see the world the way we see it. When we have a leader suffering from delusional behavior it is no surprise that some of you goosestep to his Wagnerian beat.
You think everything everything he says is the Gospel truth.Isolated Americans specially in the conservative heartland claim to be christian, yet they dont seem to care about the chaos utter world wide destabilization caused by us invading Iraq. The terrorists have gathered thousands of recruits because of it. Thousands want to fight us because we are foreign occupying force in Iraq. We can twist it, we can lie and our politicians will misuse and manipulate even honorable Generals to say what they want to hear. But ultimately as my superior experiences show, no matter even if the army is a local army, when it causes civilian casualties and it goes about arrogantly not caring for the people they are supposedly there to protect(read the history of the Indian Army Peace keeping force in Sri Lanka you fools) and (read also how SL army had to change their tactics too), it boomerangs back on us. The rage people feel when they are forced to cower when strangers with guns break their doors and drag their women and children is a world wide phenomena. Be it in N.Ireland for 80 odd years, be it in Sri Lanka or now with our mercenaries in Iraq.
I think the baseline is the racial bigotry and the callousness of people who dont give a shit. I think it is because somehow we think the oil under their sand is only our god given right and therefore I should be able to drive my fucking Cadillac Escalade or my fucking Hummer getting gallons to a mile and sacrificing soldiers per gallon that is causing this indifference. The same sort of indifference that existed before Vietnam spiralled out of control. And now this man wants to start another war? Please read this URl. Specially the ignoramuses who believed every crock of shit manipulated lie in 2003 and wanted to "'kick Arab ass" or the ones who conveniently avoided going to Vietnam when they could but now say "If I were young enough, I would don the uniform and go to Iraq". Please dont insult my limited intelligence.
The world will be far more unstable and we will be open to far more attacks EXACTLY because we invaded and ruined someone else's country on a holier than thou pretext.
All one has to do is look at recent history. The U.S. chemical warfare against the Vietnamese people killed many thousands, and left a legacy of an estimated 500,000 children with serious birth defects (Peter Waldman, “Body Count,” Wall Street Journal, 12 December 1997). Overall, upwards of 3 million people were killed in the U.S.’ counterrevolutionary war on Vietnam, plus another 2 million in neighboring Cambodia and Laos. This horrendous death toll was justified with overtly racist arguments. The commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, claimed that, “The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient” (Far Eastern Economic Review, 21 April 1975). The same grotesque arguments are used by the apologists for the U.S. imperialist invasion of Iraq today.
History of Iraq, Some more facts people should know. . The weak liberal media failed because they didn’t possess a backbone to ask the hard questions prewar. Our media failed us all because they didn’t want to be excoriated as being anti-American post 9/11. They failed because of obeisance to a regime. They failed because they didn’t want to appear unpatriotic in view of intimidating Goebbelsian propaganda from the regime’s right-wing media supporters. To this date, the liberal media ignores that the war in Iraq has caused the biggest refugee crisis in the Middle-East since 1947; there are nearly 2 million innocent Iraqis languishing in camps; most of them in Syria (a country we continue to keep bashing and refusing to talk to). Nearly 4,000 of our soldiers are dead; over twenty six thousand maimed for life. The British Medical journal LANCET estimates over 654,000 excess deaths in Iraq; conservatively nearly 30,000 are dying annually. Iraq has created millions of sympathizers, scores of willing recruits for extremists groups in the Arab world in a country where there wasn’t Al-Qaeda before. Those expressing caution were insulted before March of 2003 and derided by some political parties.
They accused those who knew facts about Iraq by saying they supported terrorism for opposing the invasion. Our media never challenged the leaders; they betrayed democracy more than the government did.However, given that most people view that thick gooey substance that is deposited beneath the Asian sands of Arabia is our God given right to own and control as we deem fit, and because resent the Arabs for having it in such mother lodes, it behooves us to examine some historical facts so that we will not repeat the mistakes of the past again by launching anther attack on the Persian Iran. History is being repeated in Iraq. British troops are finally leaving and limiting them to barracks in the Shia South in Basra. It's their third such departure from Iraq in the past 100 years. Their previous two departures were ignominious, to say the least.
The lies and deception the Blair government resorted to justify its decision to join Bush's war now stand exposed. Blair claimed that Saddam possessed weapons that threatened the security of Britain and the West. He also said that these weapons could be assembled in 45 minutes. Blair's claims were disproved one by one. Dr. David Kelly, a top scientist attached to Britain's Ministry of Defence, allegedly passed information to a BBC reporter, saying that the government had hyped the dossier against Iraq. Kelly knew what he was passing to the media. He did not want to be a part of a war that was not actually Britain's war. But within weeks of the BBC story, Dr. Kelly's body was found in a thicket. The official version was that Dr. Kelly committed suicide.
Britain's links with Iraq harks back to the World War I plot formalized in the form of a secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, under which European imperial powers (read robbers or plunderers) -- Britain and France -- agreed to share West Asia after the Ottoman Turks were defeated. Four years later, in terms of this agreement, Iraq came under Britain, with the League of Nations- providing a veneer of legitimacy. Jordan, Iraq and Palestine came under British mandate whilst France got Syria and Lebanon. Naturally, the Colonial “civilized democracies” didn’t bother to consult the populations of the countries involved. The birth of Iraq was presided over by Winston Churchill , an arrogant, colonialist who to this day is honored as a “statesman” in western histories but his contempt and racist feelings towards non-white nations he ruled was legendary (he called Gandhi a “Half-Nakd Fakir”). In Iraq, the British installed a monarch, brought in from Hijaz, Arabia. His name was Feisal, son of Hussein, Mecca's sheriff, who betrayed the Ottomans and helped Britain during World War I. While Feisal was showcased in a palace, the pro-British Iraqi elite handpicked by the imperialists dominated the government, carrying out orders they got from the British Colonial Office and the British High Commission in Baghdad. When the Iraqis rose against their occupiers, they were brutally suppressed. The colonial officers used chemical weapons or poison gas to silence the resistance forever. At the time Churchill was British secretary of state for the colonies. Churchill gave Feisal the lands formerly known as Mesopotamia, lying between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, as a consolation prize. Repeatedly from 1919 on, the population of what is now Iraq rose up against the Hashemite ruler and his British patrons.In June 1920, a full-scale rebellion broke out. British garrisons were taken by surprise as the revolt spread throughout the lower Euphrates valley. In August, the insurgents declared a provisional Arab government. But by February 1921, the revolt had been crushed, with between 8,000 and 9,000 rebels killed. This was accomplished mainly through the use of air power, by the Royal Air Force (RAF), which mercilessly bombed the insurgents using incendiary weapons and poison gas. Before the outbreak of the rebellion, the RAF asked Churchill in 1919 for permission to use chemical weapons “against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment.” Churchill as secretary of state for war asked experts if it would be possible to use “some kind of asphyxiating bombs calculated to cause disablement of some kind but not death…for use in preliminary operations against turbulent tribes.” He added: “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes” which “spread a lively terror.” General Sir Aylmer Haldane wrote that poison gas was more useful against the hilly Kurdish redoubts, while “in the hot plains…the gas is more volatile” (quoted in Geoff Simmons, Iraq: From Sumer to Saddam [MacMillan Press, 1994]). In fact, the weapons used by the RAF in its “civilizing mission” against the “turbulent tribes” were quite lethal. The British cabinet was squeamish, but Churchill argued that use of gas should not be prevented “by the prejudices of those who do not think clearly.” Eventually, poison gas was used on Iraqi rebels, with what the illustrious “statesman” described as “excellent moral effect” (quoted in David Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control. The Royal Air Force, 1919-1939 [Manchester University Press, 1990]). Today the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, successor to the Colonial Office, professes horror at the suffering of the Kurds under Hussein’s rule, which has “included the use of chemical weapons” (Saddam Hussein: Crimes and Human Rights Abuses [November 2002]). Yet this is the bloody history of the British imperialists who claim to be friends of the Kurds! In March 1917, the commander of the Anglo-Indian Army of the Tigris, Lt.-General Stanley Maude, issued a proclamation upon entering Baghdad declaring that “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators” (Robert Fisk, “The West Has Been Liberating the Middle East for Centuries,” Independent [London], 7 March). This is the fiery hell the Colonial European “liberators” visited on the Iraqi people then. Fast forward history to recent times we all understand; In 1956, Saddam took part in an unsuccessful coup attempt against King Faisal II of Iraq . Two years later, a non-Baathist group led by General Abdul Qassim (or Kassem) overthrew the king. In 1959, Hussein and other Baath supporters tried to assassinate General Qassim. They failed. In 1963, the Baath Party assassinated General Qassim. Hussein returned to Iraq. Saddam’s Baathist party launched a coup and took power in Iraq from the previous military regime in 1966. Hussein became Deputy Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. This put him in charge of internal Iraqi security and gave him the number-two position in the Baath Party.
By 1973, Hussein was vice president of Iraq under benevolent dictator President Al-Bakr. Saddam was the Vice President under a fairly benevolent Al-Bakr until he took over in 1979. We all were happily doing business with all sorts of unsavory elements in the middle-east. Iraq’s economy flush wiuth oil cash was booming, while the US was arming Iran’s dictator, Soviets were arming Iraq(both sides armed and aided many brutal dictators around the world during the cold war as a necessity)and the country was a secular socialist model in a neighbourhood full of oppressive feudal kingdoms backed by us where no one raised concerns about democracy or human rights. Saddam was encouraged to attack Iran in 1980 because of perceived threats from Shia radicals in post Revolutionary Iran, where our puppet Shah was overthrown in 1979 and we lost the critical strategic toehold in Iran. Let us remind those who have constantly changed the rationale for the war against Saddam(he killed his own people) that when Saddam was allegedly killing people and gassing Iranians, Ronald Reagan sided with Iraq and so did others. In fact the crime for which he was tried and hanged happened at a time we actively did business with him! We only remained “neutral” on the surface and we did not care a tuppence about Saddam’s human rights violations then. It was the British and American governments that blocked the Iranian resolution to the UN asking it to censure Saddam.
Ronald Reagan lifted the US State Department ban on Iraq as a nation sponsoring terrorism in 1982. He actively allowed US companies to provide components to Iraq’s chemical weapons program. The US helped Saddam with Fire Directional support, Military trucks, and other materiel help to stymie the Iranianan Shia Islamic revolution from spreading to Iraq. In 1982, the US sent 60 Defender helicopters to Iraq and By 1983,(when most of the massacred occurred) the Reagan government allowed transshipment of arms to Iraq through friendly Arab conduits. In November 1983, our Secretary of State George Schulz raised concerns about Saddam using chemical weapons against civilian populations. In December of that year Donald Rumsfeld met Saddam and assured our government’s friendship and materiel support to Saddam’s regime; it must be noted, that most international human rights organizations(painted as liberal by our conservative politicians in OK) had soundly condemned Saddam and demanded action against him. By 1985, it became obvious Saddam’s incompetent Soviet style Army could not defeat Iran, and he was increasingly being criticized for his horrendous crimes, Ronald Reagan signed a secret order to allow Iranians to buy our weapons so that the stalemate and balance of power in the region would continue.
Our brave young lads fighting and dying there today may not know that Rumsfeld visited Saddam during that time to strike billion dollar deals for Bechtel. If Saddam was repugnant then, why would our government knowingly want to strike deals with one of the most oppressive dictators in the world? Now history shows us in fact George Bush’s war has in fact strengthened radical Shia domination and radical Islamic tendencies in a nation which was secular before that. Al-Qaeda gleefully stepped into the chaos we caused(as predicted) and entrenched themselves and found willing recruits in a place they had no place under Saddam because Saddam hated them and Usama hated Saddam equally and Saddam made sure he would kill anyone who threatened his regime including Islamic terrorists and Shia radicals.All this is now revealed in Congressional records and declassified documents and can no longer be ridiculed as liberal anti-war propaganda. With a quagmire that on average is killing 1800 Iraqi civilians a month, one must wonder if our callous indifference to the civilian casualties are because of our love-hate relationship with the Arab world; a world we never tried to understand or RESPECT, that is critical to our economic and national security interests simply because of what lies beneath their soil; however is our hate because of latent Churchillian tendencies in all of us? Are we viewing those as expendable lives because of racial prejudices? Or is it a repetition of the attitudes displayed during the Vietnam war? According to the Wall Street Journal of 12 Dec 1997, U.S. chemical warfare against the Vietnamese people killed many thousands, and left a legacy of an estimated 500,000 children with serious birth defects; upwards of 3 million people were killed in the U.S.’ anti communist war in Vietnam, plus another 2 million in neighboring Cambodia and Laos. This horrendous death toll was justified with overtly racist arguments. The commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, claimed that, “The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient” (Far Eastern Economic Review, 21 April 1975). Are we still thinking on the same lines?. Liberal western media highlight and re-highlight only Hitler's gassing of the Jews - and since 2003, Saddam' use of poison gas to kill the Kurds of Halabja. Saddam was ousted, hounded and hanged, but the Britsih imperial officers who committed similar war crimes in Iraq faced no trial and made no headlines then. . As Director Brian DePalma says “In Vietnam, when we saw the images and the sorrow of the people we were traumatizing and killing, we saw the soldiers wounded and brought back in body bags. We see none of that in this war." Even to this date most of us don’t seem to know that not a single radical Islamic evil terrorist who attacked us on 9/11 was an Iraqi.
What would Jesus do?
posted by Macaca American at 10:51 PM
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