Nothing wrong with Colombia huh? Ho boy. Okay. I won't go into that. Buzz, you're a trader, right? Think you can read a trend line? It's not ONE isolated incident I'm basing my opinions on, it's a whole freakin boatload of them. Post ww2, US meddling in other nations' politics is rampant. I'd even venture to say that post Cold War it's even accelerated. That's not being angry (although, I admit it riles me to see things like this illegal attack on Iraq), it's not being resentful, it's not being brainwashed, and, let me assure you, it's certainly has nothing to do with Marxism. I'm not even asking you take my word for it. Anyone can check these things for themselves and reach their own conclusions. I'll bet you right now, though, 99% won't.
I wrote that the existence of Colombian law-breakers doesn't imply there is something wrong with Colombia. I didn't write there is nothing wrong with Colombia. Can you see the difference? But I am not surprised you can't handle logic this elementary.
By JAMES TARANTO 'In Our Hearts We Feel Something Else' The myth of pro-Saddam Iraqi "nationalism" gets a good debunking from an unlikely source: the Arab News. The English-language Saudi paper has a "unembedded" reporter, Essam Al-Ghalib, in southern Iraq, and his interviews with the locals are revealing. From a Friday dispatch: Arab News asked several of the refugees waiting to enter Basra what they thought of regime change. Accompanying Arab News were several international TV crews. What the refugees said on and off camera were very different things. On camera, the general feeling among the crowd was sorrow at losing Saddam. Off camera, the citizens of Umm Qasr and Basra appeared genuinely exhilarated at the prospect of a brighter future, after Saddam had been removed. Then this, on Sunday: When we finally made it to Safwan, Iraq, what we saw was utter chaos. Iraqi men, women and children were playing it up for the TV cameras, chanting: "With our blood, with our souls, we will die for you Saddam." I took a young Iraqi man, 19, away from the cameras and asked him why they were all chanting that particular slogan, especially when humanitarian aid trucks marked with the insignia of the Kuwaiti Red Crescent Society, were distributing some much-needed food. His answer shouldn't have surprised me, but it did. He said: "There are people from Baath here reporting everything that goes on. There are cameras here recording our faces. If the Americans were to withdraw and everything were to return to the way it was before, we want to make sure that we survive the massacre that would follow as Baath go house to house killing anyone who voiced opposition to Saddam. In public, we always pledge our allegiance to Saddam, but in our hearts we feel something else." Different versions of that very quote, but with a common theme, I would come to hear several times over the next three days I spent in Iraq. And from today's report: I asked several [Umm Qasr residents] what they thought of the US/UK plan to remove Saddam. They told me: "Now that they have started to remove him, they cannot stop. If they do, then we are all as good as dead. He still has informants in Umm Qasr and he knows who is against him and who isn't." When asked about what they think of this war, most Iraqis said that they were against the loss of innocent life and the destruction of their cities, but they seemed adamant about the removal of Saddam. They were happy about the "liberation" of Umm Qasr but were disappointed in the US/UK for not keeping their promises to provide humanitarian aid. An Arab News editorial, however, seems to come from an alternate universe: Iraqis are being subjected the "wrath of invading forces" by a "power that has come to occupy and conquer" and aims for the "wholesale destruction" of Iraqi society, "criminal enterprise--unjustified, unprovoked, illegitimate, catastrophic." Iraqis "do not believe for one moment a word of the marauders' promises." Do the Arab News editorialists read their own newspaper? (From WSJ Best of the Web 03-31-03)
who cares? I'm tiring of all these lame arguments. The same ones that were trotted out for Afghanistan. Quagmire, invasion, yada yada yada.... The only thing that will silence these idiots is when Iraq is rebuilt and made new just as Afghanistan is. But by that time their shrill voices will be raised at some other 'injustice' implemented by the imperialist US government. They are truly pathetic...not worthy even to clean the boots of a marine.
Unfortunately that won't silence them. They will find something to focus blame on....anything but themselves.
Excuse the long cut and paste - and from THE GUARDIAN of all places - but I thought you'd find this interesting, considering your interest in the psychological angle - it also has some comments extremely relevant to the topic of this thread. Also, her theme may seem contradictory to yours, but I think they're each other's flipsides (as in: by showing off, one avoids having to confront oneself): Don't take my name in vain Julie Burchill Saturday March 29, 2003 The Guardian Someone once said to me that "depression is just extreme vanity", and though obviously I don't think that everyone who's depressed is a wuss, I'm starting to think there's something to it. Some people have genuinely had their brain chemicals go wrong, for whatever reason; they've got a right to be depressed. Also, I think that people who were abused, sexually or otherwise, as children must suffer despair and sorrow in their adult lives to a degree the rest of us cannot begin to comprehend; they've got a right to be depressed. But I also think that a lot of so-called depression comes from people having no perspective on their problems - vanity, if you will. It's all about me! *** I've always thought that the last place you'd see the vanity of depression in action would be on a protest march, especially one against war in a foreign country, but I do believe that many of the anti-war antics currently taking place are totally egotistical. Those who demonstrated against US aggression in Vietnam and Cuba did so because they believed that those people should have more freedom, not less. But does the most hardened peacenik really believe that Iraqis currently enjoy more liberty and delight than they would if Saddam were brought down? If so, fair enough; if not, then they are marching about one thing - themselves. That's why so many luvvies [celebrity types?] are involved; this is simply showing off on a grand scale. I've just heard a snippet of the most disgustingly me-me-me anti-war advert by Susan Sarandon, in which she intones, "Before our kids start coming home from Iraq in body bags, and women and children start dying in Baghdad, I need to know - what did Iraq do to us?" Well, if you mean what did Saddam do to America The Beautiful, not an awful lot - but to millions of his own people, torture and murder for a start. Don't they count? Surely this is the most self-obsessed anti-war protest ever. NOT IN MY NAME! That's the giveaway. Who gives a stuff about their wet, white, western names? *** We don't know the precious names of the countless numbers Saddam has killed. We're talking about a people - lots of them parents - subjected to an endless vista of death and torture, a country in which freedom can never be won without help from outside. Contrasting British servicemen and women with the appeasers, it is hard not to laugh. Are these two sides even the same species, let alone the same nationality? On one hand the selflessness and internationalism of the soldiers; on the other the Whites-First isolationism of the protesters. Excuse me, who are the idealists here? And is it a total coincidence that those stars most prominent in the anti-war movement are the most notoriously "difficult"and vain - Streisand, Albarn, Michael, Madonna, Sean Penn? And Robin Cook! Why might anyone believe world peace can be secured by this motley bunch? Anti-war nuts suffer from the usual mixture of egotism and self-loathing that often characterises recreational depression - an unholy alliance of Oprahism and Meldrewism [?] in which you think you're scum, but also that you're terribly important, too. For instance, what about the loony who offered to be crucified on live TV if George Bush promised not to invade Iraq? "Send your troops home and take me," she wrote to the White House, adding later, "I don't want to appear as some nutter." Similarly, there are the human shields - now limping homewards after being shocked to discover, bless 'em, that Saddam wanted to stick them in front of military installations as opposed to the hospitals and petting zoos that they'd fondly imagined they were going to defend. What these supreme egotists achieve by putting themselves at the centre of every crisis is to make the Iraqi people effectively disappear. NOT IN MY NAME! is western imperialism of the sneakiest sort, putting our clean hands before the freedom of an enslaved people. But even those whose anti-war protests started in good faith now know that when Saddam's regime comes tumbling down, thousands of Iraqis will dance and sing with joy before the TV cameras, and thank our armed forces for giving them back their lives. How embarrassing it will be for the peaceniks to have to explain to the celebrants how much better it would have been for them never to have been troubled by such joy! http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,923706,00.html
It will end in disaster The US and British governments have dragged us into a mess that will last for years George Monbiot Tuesday April 1, 2003 The Guardian So far, the liberators have succeeded only in freeing the souls of the Iraqis from their bodies. Saddam Hussein's troops have proved less inclined to surrender than they had anticipated, and the civilians less prepared to revolt. But while no one can now ignore the immediate problems this illegal war has met, we are beginning, too, to understand what should have been obvious all along: that, however this conflict is resolved, the outcome will be a disaster. It seems to me that there are three possible results of the war with Iraq. The first, which is now beginning to look unlikely, is that Saddam Hussein is swiftly dispatched, his generals and ministers abandon their posts and the people who had been cowed by his militias and his secret police rise up and greet the invaders with their long-awaited blessing of flowers and rice. The troops are welcomed into Baghdad, and start preparing for what the US administration claims will be a transfer of power to a democratic government. For a few weeks, this will look like victory. Then several things are likely to happen. The first is that, elated by its reception in Baghdad, the American government decides, as Donald Rumsfeld hinted again last week, to visit its perpetual war upon another nation: Syria, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, North Korea or anywhere else whose conquest may be calculated to enhance the stature of the president and the scope of his empire. It is almost as if Bush and his advisers are determined to meet the nemesis which their hubris invites. Our next discovery is likely to be, as John Gray pointed out some months ago, that the choice of regimes in the Middle East is not a choice between secular dictatorship and secular democracy, but between secular dictatorship and Islamic democracy. What the people of the Middle East want and what the US government says they want appear to be rather different things, and the tension between the two objectives will be a source of instability and conflict until western governments permit those people to make their own choices unmolested. That is unlikely to happen until the oil runs out. The Iraqis may celebrate their independence by embracing a long-suppressed fundamentalism, and the United States may respond by seeking to crush it. The coalition might also soon discover why Saddam Hussein became such an abhorrent dictator. Iraq is a colonial artefact, forced together by the British from three Ottoman provinces, whose people have wildly different religious and ethnic loyalties. It is arguable that this absurd construction can be sustained only by brute force. A US-backed administration seeking to keep this nation of warring factions intact may rapidly encounter Saddam's problem, and, in so doing, rediscover his solution. Perhaps we should not be surprised to see that George Bush's government was, until recently, planning merely to replace the two most senior officials in each of Saddam's ministries, leaving the rest of his government undisturbed. The alternative would be to permit Iraq to fall apart. While fragmentation may, in the long run, be the only feasible future for its people, it is impossible, in the short term, to see how this could happen without bloodshed, as every faction seeks to carve out its domain. Whether the US tries to oversee this partition or flees from it as the British did from India, its victory in these circumstances is likely to sour very quickly. The second possible outcome of this war is that the US kills Saddam and destroys the bulk of his army, but has to govern Iraq as a hostile occupying force. Saddam Hussein, whose psychological warfare appears to be rather more advanced than that of the Americans, may have ensured that this is now the most likely result. The coalition forces cannot win without taking Baghdad, and Saddam is seeking to ensure that they cannot take Baghdad without killing thousands of civilians. His soldiers will shelter in homes, schools and hospitals. In trying to destroy them, the American and British troops may blow away the last possibility of winning the hearts and minds of the residents. Saddam's deployment of suicide bombers has already obliged the coalition forces to deal brutally with innocent civilians. The comparisons with Palestine will not be lost on the Iraqis, or on anyone in the Middle East. The United States, like Israel, will discover that occupation is bloody and, ultimately, unsustainable. Its troops will be harassed by snipers and suicide bombers, and its response to them will alienate even the people who were grateful for the overthrow of Saddam. We can expect the US, in these circumstances, hurriedly to proclaim victory, install a feeble and doomed Iraqi government, and pull out before the whole place crashes down around it. What happens after that, to Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, is anyone's guess, but I think we can anticipate that it won't be pleasant. The third possibility is that the coalition forces fail swiftly to kill or capture Saddam Hussein or to win a decisive victory in Iraq. While still unlikely, this is now an outcome which cannot be entirely dismissed. Saddam may be too smart to wait in his bunker for a bomb big enough to reach him, but might, like King Alfred, slip into the civilian population, occasionally throwing off his disguise and appearing among his troops, to keep the flame of liberation burning. If this happens, then the US will have transformed him from the hated oppressor into the romantic, almost mythological hero of Arab and Muslim resistance, the Salah al-Din of his dreams. He will be seen as the man who could do to the United States what the mujahideen of Afghanistan did to the Soviet Union: drawing it so far into an unwinnable war that its economy and its popular support collapse. The longer he survives, the more the population - not just of Iraq, but of all Muslim countries - will turn towards him, and the less likely a western victory becomes. The US will almost certainly then have engineered the improbable chimera it claims to be chasing: the marriage of Saddam's well-armed secular brutality and al-Qaida's global insurrection. Even if, having held out for many weeks or months, Saddam Hussein is found and killed, his spirit may continue to inspire a revolt throughout the Muslim world, against the Americans, the British and, of course, Israel. Pakistan's unpopular leader, Pervez Musharraf, would then find himself in serious trouble. If, as seems likely in these circumstances, he is overthrown in an Islamic revolt, then a fundamentalist regime, deeply hostile to the west, would possess real nuclear weapons, primed and ready to fire. I hope I've missed something here, and will be proved spectacularly wrong, but it seems to me that the American and British governments have dragged us into a mess from which we might not emerge for many years. They have unlocked the spirit of war, and it could be unwilling to return to its casket until it has traversed the world. http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,926820,00.html
Just for giggles, were you screaming doom and gloom during Desert Storm? Methinks you've been down this path before.