As usual a topic such as this becomes a nest of false bifurcations.
The Middle East views the US with suspicion for good reason.
In the early 1950's when Iranian Premier Mussadegh was seen as a threat to our oil interests, we aided a coup to bring a US friendly ruler to power. The Shah.
After the fall of the Shah and rise of radical Muslim clerics [read anti-US] in Iran in the late 1970's. We supplied arms and chemical agents to Saddam Hussein during his eight year war with Iran. When it was in our interests we supported Mr. Saddam.
When the USSR invaded Afghanistan we came to the aid of people like Osama Bin Laden. It has been openly admitted by the head of operations in Afghanistan, that the role of the US and CIA in Afghanistan was to put the guns in the hands of the shooter and let God sort it out. Our only goal was to give the Soviets "their Vietnam".
When we rightly invaded Iraq in 1991 we stopped dead at the gates to Bagdhad, and exhorted the oppressed minority Shia and Kurdish people to rise up and overthrow Hussein WITH OUR help. When the uprising began, we abandoned these people and allowed Huusein's troops to use military means to crush the revolt which WE started.
The UN and the rest of the world has long considered Israel's incursion into the four "occupied Palestinian territories" as a breach on international law and highly illegal. The Fourth Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory states that "the Occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies". Up until the Reagan administration the US was in agreement. Since then, we haven't made such claims.
The citizens of Iraq and the entire Arab World view US policies as self-serving. And when to comes to the Palestinian issue, only to the benefit of Israel. If you only watched US news you'd think Palestinian terrorists were mindless fanatics. Did you ever stop to think what might compel people in mass to resort to such means?
In the early 80's professor Talmon of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem wrote an open leter to then Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. "The combination of subjection, national oppression and social inferiority is a time bomb" for the future of Israel. Let us not compel the Arabs to feel that they have been humiliated until they believe that hope is gone and they must die for Palestine." Those are some pretty damn scary words written some twenty years ago.
Earlier this year when we finally marched into Bagdhad and their own people were tearing down statues of Saddam Hussein, we had a chance to show the world that we were there to help. We made promises that an Iraqi infrastructure with Iraqi citizens would be put in place and that all public necessities such as water, power and sanitation would be restored.
Eight months later, there are still many places without water and power. I watched on CNN during those early days when high ranking military personal and civilian experts inspecting a main power plant said all that needed to be done was some minor repair and full power could be restored because even during the shutdown it was being maintained by a skeleton crew. What happened?
We made promises that upon entering Bagdhad government offices, palaces and important places such as the Iraq National Museum would be protected from looters. Remember, all those ancient priceless artficacts that were looted, destroyed and left strewn all over a sacked museum? Why didn't we keep our promise? Incredible treasures have been lost forever.
I was absolutely in favor of the invasion of Afghanistan and the removal of the Taliban and the capture of Al Qaida operatives, especially Osama Bin Laden. But even if all those goals are achieved, we still have the responsibility of leaving Afghanistan a peaceful, self-sufficient country. We don't have the right to invade countries on a whim and leave them destroyed and ripe for the taking by who knows who. That's how the Taliban came to power in the first place.
Afghanistan may be on the road in that direction, but Bin Laden is still at large and throughout the outskirts of the country regional chieftans [warlords] have staked out their territory and have made life increasingly dangerous for ordinary Afghani citizens. And a product of our invasion there is that the opium industry is now booming. We still have a lot left to do there.
So when GW Bush made the announcement that we were going into Iraq to get Saddam and his weapons of mass-destruction, I thought this guy had fallen off his rocker. Where was the evidence for these weapons? Didn't his dad just write in his own autobiography that an Invasion of Iraq was a very ban idea?
It seems the White House's only basis of sending troops to war is based on Iraqi exile and friend to the State Department Ahmed Chalabi word that Saddam has nukes and chemical weapons? This is a guy who's wanted by the Jordanian government for bank fraud, and now he's head of the Iraqi National Congress which we installed. Then when former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson stated that he found no evidence that Hussein was trying to obtain yellowcake Uranium in Africa, his wife Vallerie Plame was outed as a spook. Are there some vindictive people on Capital Hill?
60 Minutes reported a couple weeks ago that many of the heads of local government and some chief of police are actually ex-Saddam Hussein Baath. The US has installed the very guys that were the oppressors!
Don't get me wrong, I love the US, and I wouldn't live anywhere else. But it doesn't mean I should turn a blind eye when things go askew. When it was announced we would be invading Iraq and the plans were starting to be laid out on CNN's "War" coverage it was clear that once again the US didn't have an exit plan. No mention of rebuilding was made until the war was well under way. All I saw were diagrams of the armament an A10 Thunderbolt or the Stratego type war maps on the CCN news floor.
I saw a program earlier this year where a woman who's part of the think tank that advises the Bush administration on the Middle East replied when asked if it was worth all the risks going into Iraq, her reply was, "Well, isn't just getting Hussein out of power enough?" What??!!!!!!! It's absolutely frightening that a group of people advising the President of the United States could be so shortsighted! That kind of thinking is why the US is hated by many in the Arab world and viewed with fear by many of our own allies.
Our history in the Middle East is of doing things only for our benefit and when seemingly for altruistic reasons only half way. It amazes me that so many Iraqi citizens are still friendly to the US troops, but that may very well be a measure of their hatred for Hussein. We may be the lesser of two evils in their eyes.
Since the capture of Saddam, there's a chance the resistance forces which have been inflicting damage on US troops may lose some resolve and that the people that were still afraid to openly criticize Hussein may emerge. This is our second chance to ride the wave of good feelings among Iraqi citizens and make positive gains.
Do I think we should have gone to war in Iraq? No.
Am I glad Saddam is now sitting in a US brig? Hell ya!
But now is the time to show the world that the US can do things other than war, right.
The Middle East views the US with suspicion for good reason.
In the early 1950's when Iranian Premier Mussadegh was seen as a threat to our oil interests, we aided a coup to bring a US friendly ruler to power. The Shah.
After the fall of the Shah and rise of radical Muslim clerics [read anti-US] in Iran in the late 1970's. We supplied arms and chemical agents to Saddam Hussein during his eight year war with Iran. When it was in our interests we supported Mr. Saddam.
When the USSR invaded Afghanistan we came to the aid of people like Osama Bin Laden. It has been openly admitted by the head of operations in Afghanistan, that the role of the US and CIA in Afghanistan was to put the guns in the hands of the shooter and let God sort it out. Our only goal was to give the Soviets "their Vietnam".
When we rightly invaded Iraq in 1991 we stopped dead at the gates to Bagdhad, and exhorted the oppressed minority Shia and Kurdish people to rise up and overthrow Hussein WITH OUR help. When the uprising began, we abandoned these people and allowed Huusein's troops to use military means to crush the revolt which WE started.
The UN and the rest of the world has long considered Israel's incursion into the four "occupied Palestinian territories" as a breach on international law and highly illegal. The Fourth Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory states that "the Occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies". Up until the Reagan administration the US was in agreement. Since then, we haven't made such claims.
The citizens of Iraq and the entire Arab World view US policies as self-serving. And when to comes to the Palestinian issue, only to the benefit of Israel. If you only watched US news you'd think Palestinian terrorists were mindless fanatics. Did you ever stop to think what might compel people in mass to resort to such means?
In the early 80's professor Talmon of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem wrote an open leter to then Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. "The combination of subjection, national oppression and social inferiority is a time bomb" for the future of Israel. Let us not compel the Arabs to feel that they have been humiliated until they believe that hope is gone and they must die for Palestine." Those are some pretty damn scary words written some twenty years ago.
Earlier this year when we finally marched into Bagdhad and their own people were tearing down statues of Saddam Hussein, we had a chance to show the world that we were there to help. We made promises that an Iraqi infrastructure with Iraqi citizens would be put in place and that all public necessities such as water, power and sanitation would be restored.
Eight months later, there are still many places without water and power. I watched on CNN during those early days when high ranking military personal and civilian experts inspecting a main power plant said all that needed to be done was some minor repair and full power could be restored because even during the shutdown it was being maintained by a skeleton crew. What happened?
We made promises that upon entering Bagdhad government offices, palaces and important places such as the Iraq National Museum would be protected from looters. Remember, all those ancient priceless artficacts that were looted, destroyed and left strewn all over a sacked museum? Why didn't we keep our promise? Incredible treasures have been lost forever.
I was absolutely in favor of the invasion of Afghanistan and the removal of the Taliban and the capture of Al Qaida operatives, especially Osama Bin Laden. But even if all those goals are achieved, we still have the responsibility of leaving Afghanistan a peaceful, self-sufficient country. We don't have the right to invade countries on a whim and leave them destroyed and ripe for the taking by who knows who. That's how the Taliban came to power in the first place.
Afghanistan may be on the road in that direction, but Bin Laden is still at large and throughout the outskirts of the country regional chieftans [warlords] have staked out their territory and have made life increasingly dangerous for ordinary Afghani citizens. And a product of our invasion there is that the opium industry is now booming. We still have a lot left to do there.
So when GW Bush made the announcement that we were going into Iraq to get Saddam and his weapons of mass-destruction, I thought this guy had fallen off his rocker. Where was the evidence for these weapons? Didn't his dad just write in his own autobiography that an Invasion of Iraq was a very ban idea?
It seems the White House's only basis of sending troops to war is based on Iraqi exile and friend to the State Department Ahmed Chalabi word that Saddam has nukes and chemical weapons? This is a guy who's wanted by the Jordanian government for bank fraud, and now he's head of the Iraqi National Congress which we installed. Then when former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson stated that he found no evidence that Hussein was trying to obtain yellowcake Uranium in Africa, his wife Vallerie Plame was outed as a spook. Are there some vindictive people on Capital Hill?
60 Minutes reported a couple weeks ago that many of the heads of local government and some chief of police are actually ex-Saddam Hussein Baath. The US has installed the very guys that were the oppressors!
Don't get me wrong, I love the US, and I wouldn't live anywhere else. But it doesn't mean I should turn a blind eye when things go askew. When it was announced we would be invading Iraq and the plans were starting to be laid out on CNN's "War" coverage it was clear that once again the US didn't have an exit plan. No mention of rebuilding was made until the war was well under way. All I saw were diagrams of the armament an A10 Thunderbolt or the Stratego type war maps on the CCN news floor.
I saw a program earlier this year where a woman who's part of the think tank that advises the Bush administration on the Middle East replied when asked if it was worth all the risks going into Iraq, her reply was, "Well, isn't just getting Hussein out of power enough?" What??!!!!!!! It's absolutely frightening that a group of people advising the President of the United States could be so shortsighted! That kind of thinking is why the US is hated by many in the Arab world and viewed with fear by many of our own allies.
Our history in the Middle East is of doing things only for our benefit and when seemingly for altruistic reasons only half way. It amazes me that so many Iraqi citizens are still friendly to the US troops, but that may very well be a measure of their hatred for Hussein. We may be the lesser of two evils in their eyes.
Since the capture of Saddam, there's a chance the resistance forces which have been inflicting damage on US troops may lose some resolve and that the people that were still afraid to openly criticize Hussein may emerge. This is our second chance to ride the wave of good feelings among Iraqi citizens and make positive gains.
Do I think we should have gone to war in Iraq? No.
Am I glad Saddam is now sitting in a US brig? Hell ya!
But now is the time to show the world that the US can do things other than war, right.