Well heck, of course our Chickenhawk-in-Chief lied about Iraq, that's the whole reason for the mess we're in. After all, 9/11 has been hijacked by the same neoconservative extremists that have hijacked this country and that want to abolish all the good we stand for, both nationally and internationally . 9/11 has hypocritically been abused in the past six weeks by Bush not just to defend Iraq policy and argue for oil drilling in the Arctic, but in response to questions about tax cuts, unemployment, budget deficits and even campaign finance. Meanwhile, the crudity of the administration's recent propaganda efforts, from dressing the president up in a flight suit to orchestrating the ludicrously glamorized TV movie about Dubya on 9/11, must have set even his most die-hard supporters' teeth on edge. Meanwhile, Bush and his neoconservative extremists would have you believe that criticism is, of all things in a democratic country, unpatriotic. Mark Twain had quite rightly derided what he called monarchical patriotism, the old idea that the king can do no wrong, and that the neoconservative extremists that have hijacked this country have changed to our country, right or wrong, and president lead, we'll follow. http://www.msnbc.com/news/962958.asp?0cb=-61d178650 That kind of a patriotism is more at home in monarchies of yore, George Orwells Big Brother State or communist or fascist dictatorships, but most definitely not in a free democracy with free people. Where have Bush and his neoconservative extremists brought us with their policies? After 9/11 America had the sympathy of the world, which, in just two years time, has been squandered to the extent that international opnion polls show the USA in a free fall, laughed at for our hubris while simultaneously shocked by our transparent blatant lies and subsequent fall, first world countries formerly sympathetic to us and what we used to stand for see us as having lost all credibility. And we find ourselves hated with a vengeance by many a third world country, providing a breeding for a new generation of terrorists. The war against Iraq that Bush just felt like fighting even though it had nothing to do with terrorism, that is going to cost us hundreds of billions of dollars that we didn't have in the first place what with a deficit that is about to go above half a trillion dollars, 33 million people living in poverty, 9 million unemployed, a huge number of Americans without what in most other highly developed countries is seen as the most basic insurance, health and pension, enormous private debt and savings basically non-existent, 46 million people who are analphabets etc etc, we coulda done lotsa better stuff with the money. Dubyas wars have resulted in nothing but anarchy and chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan, served as a huge recruiting drive for Al Qaeda, our real enemy, and was based on nothing but lies and deceit. If you ask why Dubya diverted resources away from hunting Al Qaeda, which attacked us, to invading Iraq, which didn't, Bush, in his normal modus operandi of fact twisting, isn't embarrassed to suggest that you're weak on national security. Fact is, Saddam Hussein was NOT linked to 9/11, had NO ties to Al Qaeda, and did NOT pose a threat to the USA ! No weapons of mass destruction have been found to this day, nor will any be found. It was known before the war against Iraq that Al Qaeda and associated groups continued to represent by far the greatest threat to Western interests, and that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq. A STRIKE on Saddam could dramatically increase the risk of terrorists obtaining WMD. Spy chiefs had virtually no intelligence about alleged quantities of chemical or biological agents held by Iraq. There was no evidence Iraq provided terror agents to Al Qaeda. Yet, Bush chose to wage a war against Iraq that cost us the sympathy and cooperation of the world we so desperately need, because that was the easy way out. Rather than fighting what really threatens us, ie international terrorism, but which unfortunately is not easily fought and located, he chose to go after the easy, albeit nonsensical and highly counter productive target of a nation you can find on a map and attack, which just happened to be Iraq, the main motive was not doing something effective against terror, but an intended demonstration of US power and strength to world. Never mind that that has completely back fired, we stand there as incompetent bunglers and liars, and Al Qaeda got a free recruiting drive. Just go back to the hype of the prewar days, when Bush was desperate to sell the war, if not to the world that never believed him in the first place, then at least to his fellow citizens. The warning uttered lacled no clarity. Iraq was allegedly a breeding ground of terror, an incubator for Al Qaeda and a clear and present danger to "the civilized world". Bush made it the heart of his case. At his eve-of-war press conference back in March, the president cast the coming attack as the next step in a story that had begun on September 11 2001. Iraq was providing "training and safe haven to terrorists, terrorists who would willingly use weapons of mass destruction against America and other peace-loving countries". The irony is that, at the time, this was not true. But it is now. With astonishing speed, Bush is making the United States nightmare come true. Iraq is fast becoming the land Dubya warned about: a throbbing hub of terror. Islamists bent on murder, all but non-existent in Saddam's Iraq, are now flocking to the country, from Syria, Iran and across the Arab world. In the way that hippies used to head for San Francisco, jihadists are surging towards Baghdad. For those eager to strike at the US infidel, Iraq is the place to be: a shooting gallery, with Americans in easy firing range. Afghanistan is perilous terrain, but Iraq is open country. For the Islamist hungry for action, there are rich pickings. Bush insisted that Saddam's Iraq was packed with these people, ready to be deployed at a moment's notice. Events have taken care of that little lacuna in the US argument. Iraq may not have been a terrorists' paradise at the start of the year - a retirement home for a few has-beens, perhaps - but it is now. Operation Iraqi Freedom blew off the gates, and Islam's holy warriors have rushed in. Not only has Bush compromised and massively denigrated the security of the USA and its citizens through the counter productive war against Iraq based on his lies, he is also hell bent on turning the very elements that define us as a country on it's head: our civil liberties, freedom, and judicial due process. We cannot just chant the new slogans from our very own Ministry of State Propaganda / Deception, if we let the neoconservative extremists that have hijacked this country continue on their path of destruction, deception, and infringement of what we stand for, we will start looking like all what we ever professed to be fighting. Sticking ones head in the sand, falling for lies and deceit and cheering it on, that is mere delusion and ultimate self destruction.
Bung: You know i like you and enjoy trading barbs with you...but lately you offer nothing in terms of substance on your posts...you trot out the same name calling litany of names .....we all understand you are very liberal and very anti bush no matter what he does or says.....but add something besides making plays on their names and calling them criminals every five seconds. peace
With astonishing speed, Bush is making the United States nightmare come true. Iraq is fast becoming the land Dubya warned about : a throbbing hub of terror. Islamists bent on murder, all but non-existent in Saddam's Iraq, are now flocking to the country, from Syria, Iran and across the Arab world. In the way that hippies used to head for San Francisco, jihadists are surging towards Baghdad. For those eager to strike at the US infidel, Iraq is the place to be: a shooting gallery, with Americans in easy firing range. Afghanistan is perilous terrain, but Iraq is open country. For the Islamist hungry for action, there are rich pickings. Bush insisted that Saddam's Iraq was packed with these people, ready to be deployed at a moment's notice. Events have taken care of that little lacuna in the US argument. Iraq may not have been a terrorists' paradise at the start of the year - a retirement home for a few has-beens, perhaps - but it is now. Operation Iraqi Freedom blew off the gates, and Islam's holy warriors have rushed in. ============================================== I agree with your statement about " iraq never had WMDS'......On a side note, please go to the very first post on this thread that I started and read what the President had to say......Those were the exact words of President Bill Clinton in 1998......Hmmm....was Prez. Clinton Lying to to get heat off him form the Monica scandal? You tell me....seriously....if they had them definitively in 1998 w/out inspectors...do you think they got rid of them on their own? regarding your statement above......this is a bad thing that they are all flocking to Iraq??? i think its great because we get to fight them on somebody else territory and not on say, the streets of manhattan using FBI agents ....I would implore all terrorist to please immediately got to Iraq and continue fighting...this way we can destroy them all.....I also would like to point out that Saddam was known to pay $$ to the family of any suicide bombers in Israel....not only is that sponsoring terrorism, that is the main problem in the middle east right now.
Iraq: the reality and rhetoric Rory McCarthy reports from al-Jisr, scene of the killing of three farmers at hands of US troops Wednesday September 24, 2003 It was the middle of the night when the crack paratroopers from America's 82nd Airborne Division arrived outside Ali Khalaf's farmhouse in the parched fields of central Iraq. Some of the family were asleep on mattresses in the dirt yard outside the single-storey house. Ali's brother Ahmad lay there with his wife, Hudood, 25, and their two young sons and so they were the first to hear the soldiers as they approached the house at around 2am yesterday. "We heard voices and so my husband went out to check what was happening. We thought they were thieves," said Hudood. "My husband shouted at them and then immediately they started shooting." By the family's account, the troops of the 82nd Airborne - known proudly as the "All American" - opened up a devastating barrage of gunfire lasting for at least an hour. When the shooting stopped, three farmers were dead and three others were injured, including Hudood's two sons, Tassin, 12, and Hussein, 10. Yesterday a US military spokesman in Baghdad, Specialist Nicole Thompson, insisted that the troops came under attack from "unknown forces". The "unknown forces" ran into a building, which was surrounded by the troops who then called in an air strike. "I can confirm at least one enemy dead," she said. The US military has chosen not to count the civilian casualties of the war in Iraq. But while more than 300 US soldiers have now been killed since the invasion to topple Saddam in March, thousands more Iraqis have died. The US military likes to advertise its achievements: how their patrols in the troubled town of Falluja, a few minutes drive from Ali Khalaf's farmhouse, hand out colouring books and repaint schools and how elsewhere they repair broken water mains and sewage plants. Most of the time it matters little. In the heartlands of central Iraq, home to the Sunni Muslim minority, and now too in the Shia-dominated provinces of the south, there is less and less sympathy for the American military and their allies. The growing wave of frustration comes only in part from the few loyalists who still fight for Saddam Hussein and increasingly from a population affronted and humiliated by the same American tactics employed yesterday. Though Sunnis, Ali Khalaf's family can have benefited little from Saddam's rule. Their homes are humble, with little electricity and only brackish drinking water. Five brothers share a few acres of farmland where they grow just enough wheat and cucumbers to survive. As mourners gathered in a tent outside the farm yesterday, the family walked through the yard, enclosed by a brick wall and pointed out where the "enemy dead" were killed. "There was no shooting from the house. It was the soldiers who shot at us," said Hudood. "There was so much firing and shelling we couldn't even get out of the farm." Four thin mattresses still lay in the open air, close to the house and stained in blood. Just a few feet away were two large craters caused, the family explained, by missile strikes from the jet fighters called in as air support. The two young boys were injured on the mattresses and then carried bravely inside by Hudood. Together the family tried to count the number of bullet holes in the wall of the farmhouse that bore the brunt of the attack. There were at least 90, perhaps 100. Outside in the fields lay dozens of the small 5.56mm bullet casings cast out by the US military's M16 assault rifles. It was probably one of these bullets which hit Ali Khalaf in the chest. He crawled inside the first room of the farmhouse apparently looking for a strip of cloth to improvise a bandage. He slumped to the floor just below the shattered glass window and next to an old wooden chest and there he died. A large pool of his blood lay caked to the floor of the room yesterday, chunks of plaster torn off the wall by the gunfire lay close by. Hudood rushed her children into the second room of the farmhouse. She sat on the ground next to the bed with her children "I covered my children in my arms and brought them close to my chest. I covered them with blankets, I thought perhaps it would help protect them," Hudood said. "They are just small children. One of them said to me: 'Don't cry mummy. We have got God with us.'" Next to her on the floor was her cousin Saadi Faqri, 30, who was staying in the house and ran to help her. During the shooting, a rocket or a large piece of shrapnel ripped through the wall of the bedroom, past Hudood and the children, and struck Saadi in the chest. He slumped on the floor and died. The third man to die, Salem Khalil, 40, was a neighbour who came running to help when he heard the shooting. His body was found lying on the ground outside. Eventually the shooting stopped, the soldiers pulled back and then they called in the air strike. At least seven missiles were fired but only one hit the house, tearing through the ceiling of an unoccupied storeroom. Yesterday morning the villagers of al-Jisr gathered to bury their dead in the large graveyard by the main road. At the same time, US military officers arrived at the farmhouse, took photographs, gathered shell casings and, through a translator, briefly apologised to the family. The words meant little. "My brother was a polite and decent man. He was poor and we had only enough farmland to survive," said Ali Khalaf's brother Zaidan, who lives nearby. "None of us are interested in politics, none of us worked in Saddam's regime. We got nothing from Saddam. "I swear we don't have any weapons in our homes and we don't have any intention to fight the Americans. But the Americans have become a heavy weight on our shoulders. They don't respect human beings, they humiliate the Iraqi people. They promised freedom and democracy. Is it freedom to kill people, make bloodshed and destroy our house? Is that what they mean by freedom?"
Quit the tax cuts for the wealthy????? Please indulge me and tell me who YOU think are the wealthy on a yearly income basis and then tell me who the politicians think are the " wealthy"....answer might surprise you .....you may be wealthy and don;t even know it ....btw, i totally disagree with doing away with 'star wars' defense program.....I use to think it was a dumb idea, but in light of N. korea and Pakistan and some of tese old soviet bloc countries i realize that it may not be possible to shoot 3000 chinese missiles out of the sky....but what if it was just one long range rocket from N. Korea??????
no worries, bud. i'll do just that. but "no matter what he does or says" isn't really true -- and you'll see that shortly after the next election. if its dean, i'll probably have alot to say about his healthcare policies. not so sure yet about the other ones, but rest assured, i'll still bitch more than enough. i think the issue here is the fact that we can't handle iraq right now with the current manpower, and that it has actually evolved rapidly into the wild wild west. you can't "win" against an enemy with endless numbers and nothing to lose. the fact is, the administration had a wing and a prayer for postwar iraq, and i don't think that any of us anticipated it being quite this bad. i think that many people realized that bringing democracy into iraq was not going to work, at least not for years. i mean, there are no police, no phones, etc. -- it's a circus. with guns. lately, i keep remembering over and over again this conversation i had with some arabs (here in the US) right before the war, and one guy explaining to me that the region had to be ruled with an iron hand, that there were many militant tribes that wanted power, and that sometimes the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know. saddam, for all of his problems, kept the country under control, and if you suddenly disrupted that with nothing in place to keep order, all hell would break loose. this is exactly what happened. how is it, that mr bush, with all of his money and advisors, did not learn what i did from a conversation with some guy on the street???? this is why i bitch and moan constantly about what a total moron W is...he's a cowboy, with no plan. it annoys me, to say the least, that despite the widespread criticism for the war, it still happened. now we're stuck with this war zone which has become a shooting gallery. we're stuck with it -- if we bail, it becomes a large, oil-bearing, beirut with a source of unlimited funding for the terrorists who now flock to it. W's going to get booted out of office, and we'll STILL be stuck with this. so what do we do now? what is the "plan" for postwar iraq??? and what's going to stop another saddam from coming to power?? and what if that leader is democratically elected?? it's probably going to be "you can elect any leader you want, as long as we like him/her" and that is NOT democracy. man, that MSNBC article...from the mouth of none other than rocket scientist Britney Spears: âI think we should just trust the president in every decision he makes,â she told CNN, âand we should just support that, and be faithful in what happens.â god help us all. TM, the star wars defense WILL NOT WORK. 60billion dollars during reagan era and it PRODUCED NOTHING. scientists were telling 'ol ronnie the whole time that it WOULD NEVER WORK. plus, any organization that will nuke us is NOT going to send a rocket. doing that would show us EXACTLY who is attacking us, which would be SUICIDE for the attacker. think about it. if N korea wants to nuke us, the last thing they're going to do is send a traceable rocket...it's going to be smuggled over here or maybe even just off the coast of some major city...NOT shot in a missle with a return address....
Great reply brother bung....but Iraq is not the wild west and we will have it under cntrol soon....I have a problem wiht the Iron fist apporach....how many mass graves have to be uncovered for you and others to realize some serious shit was going on over there? the sons of Saddam and the stories comign out....your ok with that as long as they keep it under control? I guess you gfeel that if rape is inevitable the woman should just sit back and enjoy the ride, as Bobby Knight once said?? I also think Star wars will work...how can you say with out a doubt it will not work? Think about the technolgy we have accumulated over the last 20 years?? I personally think it should be a priority , especially with these rogue nations out there..
So the election plan for the Dem's will be we'd be better off with Saddam in office than W, we should immediately pull out of Iraq and we should just hand the whole mess over to the UN? I can only hope they run on that platform. Watching the Democrat primary struggle and reading Bush haters here have only convinced me how out of it they are. In fact I believe this is why Clinton arranged for Wesley Clark to get in the race. As loathsome as Clinton is, he is one smart SOB. He sees the party getting further and further off the mainstream. Hillary has one shot, in '08, and while they surely would prefer for Bush to win than any of these Dem candidates, I don't think Clinton wants Hillary to have to deal with a party that has been massively repudiated by the voters.
You're right about N. Korea and the overall issue of proliferation, which is exactly why I think that port security is more important than any military program aimed at national security. It's far easier to send a bomb via FedEx or UPS than via an intercontinental ballistic missile. Plus, the N. Koreans are too busy selling all of their stolen weapons so they can eat (only the regime, of course. Everyone else starves). Plus, the technology isn't even close to being ready for "Star Wars". It wasn't in the 80's, it isn't now, and the best estimates put the date at least a decade into the future. As for the designation of wealthy, I'd be happy if they drew the line at a half million dollars. That would save a good chunk of the trillion+ and I'm not quite there yet