POLL: The repercussions of a US attack on Iraq

skeptic123 asked Msfe "I mean, you do not really think Iraq is free of WMD, do you?"

Msfe replied : "yes, that´s what I think - not so sure about the USA though"


I heard this morning on Cable TV that Iraq's ambassador has now announced that Iraq has made a strategic decision and will co-operate with the inspectors and dispose of all weapons of mass destruction.

Hey, Msfe, I thought you said that you believe that they didn't have any.

Msfe, as it appears extremely difficult for you to change your mind would you be happy if we have a collection amongst ourselves to raise sufficient money to send you to Iraq so you can go and check whether that Iraqi ambassador was indeed telling the truth (and the implication being that they now acknowledge they have WOMs ?

Consider it as a goodwill proposal by us to you. Whilst you are there you could join the wall of protectors.

freealways

 

US To Pay Iraqi Government Salaries After War
By Pamela Hess 3-11-3
UPI Pentagon Correspondent


WASHINGTON (UPI) -- The United States plans to pay the salaries of some 2 million Iraqi government workers, from ministry heads to teachers and nurses, to immediately stabilize the country and begin reconstruction once the probable war is won, senior defense officials said Tuesday.

The Pentagon is trying to recruit more than 100 free Iraqis -- those who were born in Iraq but left and now live in Western democracies -- to act both as liaisons with the provinces and as advisers to government ministries. They would in effect be the eyes, ears and voice of U.S. Central Command with the government agencies.

"I had great hopes for that process. But it's not going as fast as I'd like," a senior official said. "The free Iraqis ... will facilitate in those provinces to explain things to people who've been oppressed for the last 30 years."

The Pentagon is explicitly not hiring members of the Iraqi National Congress -- an organization of eight expatriate groups that has long advocated the overthrow of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

"They count, but we are not trying to hire any of them right now," the official said.

The intent is for the "free" Iraqis to serve with pay for up to 120 days and then return to the United States or Europe. The officials are concerned INC members -- who have long had designs on returning to Iraq to rule -- would edge out the indigenous Iraqis the United States believes ultimately need to be in charge for reconstruction to succeed.

The Pentagon wants to hire two to three "free" Iraqis with appropriate expertise to advise each of the 21 or 22 ministries, plus at least another 14 Iraqis to work with the 14 non-Kurdish provinces to determine their reconstruction needs and concerns.

"The Iraqis will continue to run the ministries, and we are going to pay their salaries," the official said. "The free Iraqis understand the democratic processes" and will help them make the transition.

 

Madison:

`The Pentagon is trying to recruit more than 100 free Iraqis -- those who were born in Iraq but left and now live in Western democracies -- to act both as liaisons with the provinces and as advisers to government ministries. They would in effect be the eyes, ears and voice of U.S. Central Command with the government agencies.

The intent is for the "free" Iraqis to serve with pay for up to 120 days and then return to the United States or Europe.

The free Iraqis understand the democratic processes and will help them make the transition.´


couldn´t they find 100 "free" Americans who understand the democratic processes - in the mother of all democracies ?

 

hmm... maybe they should post this story in the unemployment offices that seem to be having more and more visitors lately...

but, as they keep saying, it's a small price to pay for Iraqi "liberation," right...?

 

LUNCH WITH THE CHAIRMAN
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

Why was Richard Perle meeting with Adnan Khashoggi?


http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/030317fa_fact

 

A noted German poet who begs to differ
By John Vinocur/IHT (International Herald Tribune)
March 11, 2003


HAMBURG: Like politicians, in the face of history, poets don’t always get it right. Gerhard Schroeder voted against the treaty enabling German reunification. Guenter Grass opposed his country’s unity, suggesting it was an unfitting reward after Auschwitz.

They were brave then perhaps, certainly in the German minority. Schroeder later wanted to put off the euro’s introduction indefinitely, and tried as a provincial governor to stop the Gulf War. Now, with the vast majority of opinion-polled Germans, the chancellor will have nothing to do with a strike on Iraq, rejecting the possibility of United Nations approval months before it was proposed. Grass, the country’s dominant literary figure, turns up (again) on the same page.

The poet who sees things differently these days is Wolf Biermann, lyricist, balladeer, an incontravertible figure of respect in Germany. Hard to classify, this lank-haired man with washed-out blue eyes who writes poems, sings songs, and offers up an occasional, enormously readable political essay. ‘‘Great poet’’: So says, very judiciously, a man from the chancellery, having just heard, a couple of days later, what Biermann thinks of his boss.

Biermann, 66, is sitting at a little table, near the window of his house in Altona, a nice suburb, close to downtown, a good place for his small children.

Schroeder is not his main preoccupation. It is his country, its ‘‘harte deutsche Vaterlands-Mus,’’ or, roughly and inadequately, ‘‘the hard must of the German Fatherland.’’ But with his name slipping into the conversation, Biermann contrasts the current chancellor’s soft position on Saddam Hussein with a Churchill battling appeasement, or Tony Blair’s treading against the flow.

‘‘Schroeder’s opportunism is the worst,’’ Biermann says. ‘‘He’s a victim of a democratic pratfall. All this guy wanted to do was get elected, and he turns out morally to be under Chamberlain and Daladier. Their appeasement policy was wrong, but at least they were serious. There was no historical experience to go on then.’’

He slashes on, turning to Goethe and Brecht for verbal flanking fire.

‘‘Every error has its time,’’ Biermann insists, calling on phrases from the two German giants as witness. ‘‘There are mistakes that are on the level of history, and those that are under the level of history. Schroeder’s appeasement policy is under that level. It’s worse than a mistake, it’s a crime.’’

Schluss. Case quickly closed on Schroeder. Biermann goes to the core. Democracies, regrettably, cannot only fake threats and hope for success against regimes that have total contempt for humanity. In both France and Germany, there are amnesiac people who will never excuse the Americans for having liberated them. But in Germany, he goes on, the movement against the war has been co-opted from honest pacifists by old Reds, frustrated ’68ers, former East German functionaries, and disillusioned Christian Democrats, whose single register bares the mark of German nationalism.

This is minority stuff here; Biermann can think of none of his friends, in Hamburg at least, who agree with him. But like Grass, he has the exceptional German bonafides to sustain his view and have it heard in a society that craves riskless consensus.

The son of a Communist murdered by the Nazis, he left West Germany at age 17 for East Berlin, where he became a writer whose renown and eventual role as a dissident grew together. In 1976, he was expelled from East Germany to in stant elevation as a cultural hero in the West. His poetry remained a source of vast admiration, but his politics gradually changed. From someone, after coming West, who joined demonstrators blocking U.S. Army bases (and remembers, he says, ‘‘how good it feels to be part of the Oh So Very Good’’), he returned to the dissident’s role as a German who sees ‘‘vulgar hatred’’ and paranoia in the ‘‘the propaganda bogeyman’’ that has been projected here onto the White House.

In fact, with a German press, like Britain’s, that has much more a pro and con division on Iraq than the single, missionary position of French newspapers, Biermann hardly speaks from persecuted isolation.

But what he says is tougher, more direct, and comes with the whip-stroke of his rage. He calls the meld of Germans now challenging the use of force against Saddam ‘‘National Pacifists’’ — no small damnation in a language where the word national, as in National Socialists, shakes with the sound of abjectness, a curse.

The movement against a war on Iraq, Biermann says, is bringing together into a ‘‘macabre,’’ nationalistic community, a nation that is in many ways even more divided now than before the fall of the Wall.

In defining the German state of mind, Biermann makes reference in part to the legacy of Nazism.

‘‘The Bible says you’re damned until the fourth generation. I didn’t understand this before. What’s the deeper meaning? The first (postwar) generation goes against the fathers in a process of opposition. The next goes against that opposition. The Germans are now in the second phase.

‘‘There are power vectors all pressing in the same direction. The first is the reflex against the postwar generation. The second is the panic-reflex against globalization. You see it everywhere. As the world gets closer together, you hang on to what’s smallest. The third is confronting European unification, a kind of two-front war — the first against America, and the second to see who’s top monkey in Europe.’’

But the bombs, the deaths to come? Biermann tells a story of he and his mother surviving the storms of fire that devastated Hamburg after British air raids in 1943. Down the street from the flames, his mother told him then that these ‘‘terrible, terrible bombers are going to free us from evil, evil people who took Papa away.’’

Who will listen in Germany, a visitor in Biermann’s house asks him?

He replies: ‘‘The muses say, ‘Come here little Biermann. You write the prettiest poems.’ The rest can kiss my ass. My poems will last longer than Schroeder. I only stay in power when I follow my muse. The Schroeders last only as long as they follow the rabble.’’

 

What are you doing Babak ?

You really should have left it it Msfe, being even handed as he is, to post this insightful piece.

freealways

 

Sorry for the silly title, this is really about Iraq:

http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/breaking_9.html

 

Swiss Vatican Guard

is a short-range, light weapon that can perform a variety of missions. It is capable of running at speeds up to 15 m.p.h., depending on the drag created by the weapon's outer pillow pants. It can carry a variety of ordinance, including pikes, daggers, swords, and the occasional mace.

In a conventional conflict, the Swiss Guard can perform strategic yelling, bowing, chanting, and quote verbatim from the Bible. During Desert Storm, the Guard performed 85% of all the latrine duties at the Vatican. It is highly effective when used for picture-taking, directing lost cardinals to the taxi stand, or as last-minute replacements at a preschool party, bar mitzvah, or Jolly Roger restaurant opening. Two Swiss Guards, in two hours, can monitor exactly 4.5 square meters of the Vatican while standing at full attention.

 

The only problem is that I suspect that Msfe didn't tell us the truth about himself so there isn't really a connection between him and the Swiss Guards.

I base that on the fact that Msfe will beat a Swiss Guard anyday anytime when it comes down to being one eyed and someone who can only guard the left (or right, whatever may be the case) half of the 4.5 square metres of the vatican would not pass the acceptance rules of the Guards.

freealways