Wondering if hi oooo ii aa (sp?) and those who agree with his ideology would ever admit that DOING NOTHING also has consequences, potentially tragic ones.
when did I advocate doing nothing? I questioned the wisdom of a single country initiating a war in opposition to the rest of the world. surely, if the problem were as serious as you indicate, it would gain some support beyond those openly looking for a bribe. in the face of the stated justifications for war, that no other peoples thought it was proper either indicts the remainder of the world as monsters, or calls into question those justifications. that the whole thing was carried out by only one country, weak attempt to cite a 'coalition' nonwithstanding, should indicate something to an open-minded person. "liberal peacenik"? are you a "conservative sadist"? that's nonsense.
Madison your logic is good very good but you conclusion about indicting the rest of the world as monsters is sadly something you have to consider about all governmental leaders. The price of freedom is vigilence. I believe the history of the world shows many more monsters (world leaders) than courageous actors who stood for what is right. In fact just look around the world right now and see that with the collapse of the USSR we are just starting to incubate non monsters. But the middle east is filled with monster leaders. Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were. Central and South America have had their share until perhaps recently. In do not even know what is going on in Africa. So there is a strong chance you have monsters and monster residue. So yes indict the world and hope that the U.S. and some of the West have been lucky enough and guided enough to elect people of conscience like Tony Blair (I am really impressed by his stance) and George Bush. By the way I sense that on the whole the UN by virtue of its structure isa mostly corrupt POS body only capable of acting in the most benign situations.
Be real. By adhering to the stance that action is only allowable with the rest of the world's approval, you are basically DOING NOTHING, at least nothing SUBSTANTIAL. If muttering lame UN resolutions and not backing them up is, in your opinion, indicative of worthwhile action, I'd like to sell you your next car. How wonderful it is that your willingness to have other countries dictate what is right and wrong for the US to do is a minority opinion. Wonderful too for the Iraqi people.
Kymar, the point is that you (the US) are largely responsible for such a state of affairs. You were all too happy, all too willing, to allow the above to occur; hell, you actively encouraged it (as was shown to you when you asked for the evidence, which I hope you're now not going to pretend didn't happen). Now that the actors are reading from a different script to the one you had earlier envisioned -- and you don't like it -- you're scurrying around looking for the "2 minute noodles" solution. Well, it's time to wake up. The problem wasn't created overnight and it sure as hell isn't going to be "fixed" overnight. That's why, wishful thinking though it was, I said I would prefer it for the US to have lost this war. Because you truly need to go back to the drawing board and reassess your position in the world and the way you relate to it -- not the fat cats holding the reins of power, but you, the American people; you need to do that, that is, if hopes for a "better world" are to be anything more than a smoke screen for geopolitical -- and thus economic -- advantage seeking.
the Bush regime has won this war against the U.S. constitution and the UN charta before the first shot was fired
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,819931,00.html Edited for the less-inclined: Gore Vidal ... argues that what he calls a 'Bush junta' used the terrorist attacks as a pretext to enact a pre-existing agenda to invade Afghanistan and crack down on civil liberties at home. Vidal writes: 'We still don't know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain to many civil libertarians that 9/11 put paid not only to much of our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected President with the oil and gas Bush-Cheney junta.' Vidal argues that the real motive for the Afghanistan war was to control the gateway to Eurasia and Central Asia's energy riches. He quotes extensively from a 1997 analysis of the region by Zgibniew Brzezinski, formerly national security adviser to President Carter, in support of this theory. But, Vidal argues, US administrations, both Democrat and Republican, were aware that the American public would resist any war in Afghanistan without a truly massive and widely perceived external threat. 'Osama was chosen on aesthetic grounds to be the frightening logo for our long-contemplated invasion and conquest of Afghanistan ... [because] the administration is convinced that Americans are so simple-minded that they can deal with no scenario more complex than the venerable, lone, crazed killer (this time with zombie helpers) who does evil just for the fun of it 'cause he hates us because we're rich 'n free 'n he's not.' Vidal also attacks the American media's failure to discuss 11 September and its consequences: 'Apparently, "conspiracy stuff" is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.' 'It is an article of faith that there are no conspiracies in American life. Yet, a year or so ago, who would have thought that most of corporate America had been conspiring with accountants to cook their books since - well, at least the bright dawn of the era of Reagan and deregulation.' At the heart of the essay are questions about the events of 9/11 itself and the two hours after the planes were hijacked. Vidal writes that 'astonished military experts cannot fathom why the government's "automatic standard order of procedure in the event of a hijacking" was not followed'. These procedures, says Vidal, determine that fighter planes should automatically be sent aloft as soon as a plane has deviated from its flight plan. Presidential authority is not required until a plane is to be shot down. But, on 11 September, no decision to start launching planes was taken until 9.40am, eighty minutes after air controllers first knew that Flight 11 had been hijacked and fifty minutes after the first plane had struck the North Tower. 'By law, the fighters should have been up at around 8.15. If they had, all the hijacked planes might have been diverted and shot down.' Vidal asks why Bush, as Commander-in-Chief, stayed in a Florida classroom as news of the attacks broke: 'The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.' Asking whether these failures to act expeditiously were down to conspiracy, coincidence or error, Vidal notes that incompetence would usually lead to reprimands for those responsible, writing that 'It is interesting how often in our history, when disaster strikes, incompetence is considered a better alibi than .... Well, yes, there are worse things.' Vidal draws comparisons with another 'day of infamy' in American history, writing that 'The truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied. 11 September, it is plain, is never going to be investigated if Bush has anything to say about it.' He quotes CNN reports that Bush personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to limit Congressional investigation of the day itself, ostensibly on grounds of not diverting resources from the anti-terror campaign. Vidal also highlights the role of American and Pakistani intelligence in creating the fundamentalist terrorist threat: 'Apparently, Pakistan did do it - or some of it' but with American support. "From 1979, the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA was launched in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan ... the CIA covertly trained and sponsored these warriors.' Vidal also quotes the highly respected defence journal Jane's Defence Weekly on how this support for Islamic fundamentalism continued after the emergence of bin Laden: 'In 1988, with US knowledge, bin Laden created Al-Qaeda (The Base); a conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells spread across 26 or so countries. Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda.' In Vidal's most recent book, The Last Empire, he argued that 'Americans have no idea of the extent of their government's mischief ... the number of military strikes we have made unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947 is more than 250.' RLB21079: I have no staunch position on this war, just thoughts. Good? Bad? I have done far too little research on the matter to berate another, I can at best continue to educate myself on what is a very complex and perpetual game called world politics.
Hey Alf, try working on your own country, huh? Argentina's a basket case - leading lights like yourself may be able to improve the situation there. Or would that actually require some effort beyond tapping on a keyboard all day railing against the evil U.S. of A?
Thanks for posting the Gore Vidal links rlb. I had been thinking of posting some of his writings in various threads including the one on Syria. His views present a radical but coherent view of the US's use of force since the end of ww2. Below are clips from an interview Vidal did with with salon.com last year: from http://fiot.1accesshost.com/vidal2.html Let me ask you a more general question pertaining to your views about the legitimate uses of American power. Your general ideological affiliation is clearly a Jeffersonian one. You're wary of entangling alliances and you believe that projections of American power tend to be driven by less than lofty motivations, and tend to often end badly. And I'm wondering if there are cases when American intervention is justified, in your mind. Let's take the example of Rwanda. Would an American military intervention into that horrific situation have been justified? Certainly not. Minding one's own business is a virtue, and particularly if your business has traditionally been business, at which we were once very good. It is best that we keep our own house in proper order, and put our money into what Henry Clay called internal improvements. We haven't internally improved the United States plant in 50 years, and the place is falling apart. Did you know that they don't teach geography any more in the public schools? They asked a cross-section of Americans, they showed them a globe of the world with all the continents and islands and oceans, and asked them to identify the United States. Nothing was labeled. And something like 80 percent couldn't find it. And a great many of them had a sense of humor, they picked Panama, because it's a nice little thing with two big globes, one above it, one below it. Now if you haven't taught the people geography and history, and you're in the global empire business, you are preparing for catastrophe. People don't know where things are. They don't want to go off -- we have never wanted to go off and fight in foreign wars. The foreign wars have always been arranged for us -- now I reveal my populist roots -- but have always been the work of Eastern banks, by and large, or a governing class, which likes the idea of adventure. I specifically refer to Henry Cabot Lodge, to Brooks Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Captain Mahon -- these are the four horsemen who gave us our first international empire, which was the Spanish-American War, which got us into the Philippines, which got us into Asia. It was just a small group. The American people had to be dragged into World War I, and they had to be really tricked into World War II. Now, I think it was a good idea to defeat Hitler. I would have said eventually we would have gone in on England's side. But what Roosevelt faced was the fact that 80 percent of the people then, at the time of Pearl Harbor, refused to go to war. It was as flat as that. And the America First movement was huge, and everybody was in it from right wing to left wing, and so on. So we are a pacific people, and we have plenty of territory. And yet our bankers and internationalists were very interested in foreign adventures. J.P. Morgan was largely responsible for World War I, when the Brits ran out of money in 1914, and Morgan single-handedly upheld the pound, until finally he said, well, this is absurd, and he persuaded Wilson, he said, you've got to do something. And I'm afraid we must be at war, because only a nation can uphold another nation's currency. Hence that came to pass. That is the background to our adventure.... In "The Last Empire" you denounce the rise of what you call "the national security state," and Truman's arrogation of an enormous amount of power to fight the Communist menace. But while there were clearly excesses in the fight against Communism, particularly on the Cold War domestic front, the evils of the Soviet empire, detailed for instance in the horrible revelations of the "Black Book of Communism," clearly demonstrate that our own empire was far more benign in comparison, don't you agree? But it was also far less aggressive than we were. Stalin only made trouble on his borders, with border states. Because after all, the Russians do have a memory of being constantly invaded. We have never been invaded. Well, once we were, by the Brits. But in general, he was paranoid about that, and he was paranoid about the bad faith of the United States. Roosevelt agreed to a number of things at Yalta which really were against Stalin's interests. But he went along with it because he trusted him. Truman comes along, goes to Potsdam, discovers through a telegram from New Mexico that the atom bomb works, and he doesn't need Stalin for the final war against Japan. So he starts to break every agreement that he had made with Stalin, who then gets not only paranoid, but gets hysterical. Then when we unite the French, the British and the American regions of Germany, leaving Stalin with Prussia, which was the lousiest part, we form another country with a new currency, which is far better than anything the Russians have got. We pretend that Stalin divided Germany. He didn't; we did. We have absolutely rewritten all of history. It's like the famous Barak plan that Arafat turned down. This is constant rewriting. To make ourselves look quite different from what we really were. The Cold War was on Truman's head, because he thought he didn't need Stalin, he didn't like Stalin. He saw no use for us to even bother in that part of the world, but if we did, we would have the best part of Germany, which he then started to rearm, which put Stalin into great hysterics. And that's when he sealed off Berlin, and we had to do the airlift and so on, and the Cold War really got going. That's on our head, but you're not going to hear that in the schools, and nobody will write that in the press, or if they do, it'll be in a scholarly paper, unread. But don't you believe that Stalin would have carried out his ruthless expansionism in Eastern Europe without much provocation? No. He'd taken just about everything he needed. Poland has always been something that the Russians have grabbed from time to time. And Czechoslovakia, they didn't seem to really want it when they started in, but they just kept on. Where was he going to go? Some time ago, I had a conversation with a big fat man called General Vernon Walters, remember him? Just died. A great geopolitician. And he was moaning away, we were at the American Embassy in Rome, moaning away about how they're winning, they're winning everywhere. All over the world are communists, the world is going communist, and we do nothing. He said, just look at the map, you'll see what's happened. The Russians are everywhere. Communism is spreading. And we are shrinking. I said, well, we haven't done too badly since the second war. Well, he said, look at Romania, for instance. Romania -- he started a speech. I said, oh, come off it. Stalin got Romania, and my God, every night I wake up shivering at the thought of those poor Romanians in his clutches. But we got Germany. Well, he said, that's different. And what about his attempt in Greece? I said, he didn't attempt anything. He let the Greek Communists die. He was not going to interfere in that one. Well, in Asia, he started. I said, yeah, yeah, he got North Korea, by God. That was shrewd of him, wasn't it. We got Japan, General. And that was the end of him. I could hear him mutter Is it really legitimate to compare the hegemonic control of the Soviet Union over the Warsaw Pact countries with the control that the United States had over its NATO allies? Well, we have a lighter hand. All NATO was was a means of keeping control over Western Europe. We were not there to save the French from the marching Russians. The Russians weren't marching anywhere. We were there to make sure that Western Europe didn't have Communist governments, that we could control them. The CIA was formed in order to control public opinion. Its first great coup, and I was in Italy in 1948 at the time of the April elections when it looked like the Communists might well win it, the CIA spent a fortune. They bought newspapers, they bought magazines, they bought politicians, they bought political parties, anything to keep [Palmiro] Togliatti [the founder of the Communist Party of Italy] out of the government. And they kept him out, which I think in the long run was a mistake, as the Italian Communists were somewhat to the right of Senator Taft, a Republican figure of those days...
Whether or not there was a conspiracy, the President's actions that day were surely criminally negligent no? Look at the facts: The FAA knew by, at the latest, 8:40 am that Flight 11 had been hijacked meaning that bodies like the National Military Command and the Secret Service would also know. So when the plane hit the WTC at 8:46 these government bodies would have no doubt that it was a terrorist attack. (Not unless they were complete morons, anyway.) Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it the Secret Service's job to protect the President? It's common knowledge that the President was informed of the first plane incident by at latest by 9:00am, when he arrived at Booker to listen to school kids read stories. But if the Secret Service knew, or was 99.99% sure, that the first WTC wasn't just an accident, but an actual terrorist attack, then surely the President would have been informed of this. It's inconceivable that such important information would be kept from him. So Bush almost definitely sat down to listening the kids read their story knowing full well a terrorist attack had taken place. Then, while he's listening to the children story, Andy Card tells him that the second plane hit the WTC. Well, geez, even if Bush hadn't known the first plane was an attack (and I think there is absolutely every reason to believe he did), then surely it would be immediately obvious to anyone with half a damn brain after the second attack took place. But what does Prez do? After being informed of the second attack at 9.06, he continues to sit there listening to school kids read a story about a goat for the next twenty minutes! Unbelievable! Here's another bit of interesting info. A friend of mine sent me a Time article, written in 1994, about terrorist threats to the Presidency. This is an exert from it: "During the cold war, when security agents used to play war games involving terrorist threats to the White House, the one unsolvable problem was a commercial airliner loaded with explosives working its way into the landing pattern at Washington National Airport, then veering off for a suicide plunge into the White House. The only answer was to shut down the airport, which Congress refused to consider, since its proximity and reserved parking spaces are prized legislative perks. " You can verify that an article entitled "The Presidency: Never Safe Enough" was written by Hugh Sidey by doing a search on Time's website. But it will only show the first couple of paragrahs. I have what I'm told is the full text for anyone what wants to read it. So I think it's pretty fair to assume the Secret Service was well aware of what threat hijacked airliners could pose, and yet, here we have two hijacked airliners smashing into the WTC, obviously a co-ordinated attack, and neither they [the Service] nor the Prez, the Commander in Chief!, thinks it's urgent enough to disturb him from listening to stories about goats. And then it gets even worse. Not only did the Prez neglect his duty, as the Com in Chief, to safeguard himself, but then he actually lied about how he knew about the WTC attacks. CNN Transcipt of this event In a Town Hall meeting in Orlando, an 8 year old boy asked the President "...how did you feel when you heard about the terrorist attack"? Prez: "Well, Jordan (ph), you're not going to believe what state I was in when I heard about the terrorist attack. I was in Florida. And my chief of staff, Andy Card -- actually I was in a classroom talking about a reading program that works. And I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower -- the TV was obviously on, and I use to fly myself, and I said, "There's one terrible pilot." And I said, "It must have been a horrible accident." But that's absolute bullshit. There was no way the Prez could have seen the first attack on TV at 9:00am! We didn't get the video footage of that until way later. Prez: "....And so I got on the phone from Air Force One asking to find out the facts." More BS. He didn't get on Airforce One until about 10:00am, almost an hour after he was informed of the 2nd attack. Obviously not enough to yell conspiracy, but geez, you could sure make a case for dereliction of duty.