strike on iraq

Before you condemn the U.S. for asking for new conditions, let's see what they are. I too think you can't add new stuff to the conditions to suit any uncovered wishes. It is my understanding that the new conditions are not new at all. They are things along the lines of adding words like, unimpeded access, unlimited inspection, etc.

If that be the case, then what will your argument be as that is what the original inspections were thought to have implied? If the new language does no more than close the wiggle room that Sadamn has been using, and he says that is not fair, what will YOU say then?

 

Again I say, let's see what the new U.N. language calls for before we start shouting "Bad America!" If it does no more than cut off Sadamn's wiggle room, then I see no problems with it.

If the new language does no more than make clarifications, and Sadamn thinks that he is being violated, T-O-U-G-H!

I don't know too many people wondering aloud why terrorists, dictators, and extremists hate us. I only hear that verbiage when someone really is not interested in accepting the truth. Again, I can't put much credence in an opinion from someone who has limited (at best) information about the "Peoples of America" to work with. Just as they put little weight in your uninformed opinion of them. Couple that with me then looking at their conditions which they would be using as a point of reference and I really have issues.

Rather than condemn them, I would be trying to explain, help and assist them in IMPROVING their own positions. Daily I see comments here about the evil American based policies and the implied hatred of America by the Arab world. Well, I would tell you that I find fault in THAT statement.

I have several friends and associates who have lived, worked and exchanged views in the regions in question. And while that may start to raise some other issues in your mind, you should also understand that it is not on just a "Hey How you doing at arms length" basis.

Now let me throw you another curve ball, I am an African American born and raised in Chicago in the late 50's. I have spent many years traveling and working with many peoples of the world. While I am a computer tech now, I have a twenty-five plus year work resume.

It includes responsibilities and duties such as special hazards engineer for international projects (working in Saudi Arabia) and president of my own nutritional beverage company. Even now, I am assisting with a company establishing ties with several third world countries for health related product sales. So when I say that the international attitude of the PEOPLES does not match your thinking, I am speaking from actual personal observations and contacts.

So what are you hearing and seeing you ask? You are hearing the many regimes, special interest groups (foreign and domestic), and those with media control and their opinions. You are seeing the financial and political interests and their desire to have you BELIEVE that there are large amounts of mass hatred.

Believe me, the poor of the world are not devoting much time or energy wondering if you have enough oil, creature comforts and material goods in America. Nor do they blame their condition in life on some person in America on the turnpike in an SUV.

Now, don't think for a minute that there is not a vocal, action oriented group who WILL KILL YOU! But we have our own extreme groups in this country. They are not foreigners either. I look at the Klan, the Skin Heads, the Crips and Bloods, the White Supremists. They clearly have heir own agendas but they definitely don't speak to the issues of the masses. You can not look and universally say that they represent the American average person on the street positions in their behavior.

Now should we allow these groups to institute their wills internationally, cause havoc and terror, and then operate unfettered within our borders, then we would have to accept the consequences that would come from that decision? And if we did not like the consequences, then we would not need the world to tell us what we should do.

And because we are allowed to gather, express the opinions, and take the needed action for the good of the whole. Hey, wait a minute. Ain't that what is not allowed (truly) in many of the Arab countries who have a problem with us. Before you just say that they have a RIGHT to an opinion, look at where the opinion comes from. By inferring their RIGHTS, have you not given them something that they really don't have at their disposal. The masses that is.

You continue to operate within this framework understanding of yours that this IS their opinion because they said so. I say, you need to really get access and look, understand, probe deeper than the surface generally allows. Then really understand that it really ain't about control of oil, on their side of the equation. You will never be able to change the understanding and behavior until you look through the other side of the window.

 

I could live with this should it be the planning. It shows me that considerations for minimal loss of life on both sides ARE being considered. War preparations are being conducted responsibly, if there is such an action.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/811140.asp?pne=msn

 

sorry, i am just sick and tired of these chickenhawks and their hidden agenda. if they want war so badly they should have gone when they had the chance. now they engage in spreading propaganda and brainwashing the american public and sending innocent americans to a battle that should never have been started. there are worse leaders than saddam and there are countries that are in defiance of many more UN resolutions than Iraq is. so what is the real reason these chickenhawks want certain genocide?????

 

Please define "genocide" and show me the ACTUAL administration call for it? Not your supposition, speculation or misquoted statements, but the actual party that we can attribute it to. I have a definite understanding of the word and it does not fit your usage here.

If someone at the advisory level has actually asked for genocide, then I need to know the facts so that I too can denounce it! If it has not been stated, then this usage that you have here is how things quickly get expanded beyond the truth. I would love to debate and understand the facts as they are, and the call for genocide would be a key point for me.

It is the reason that that many folks are walking around in unsubstantiated anger and few facts. You see, someone will quote you. Then that person gets quoted, and so on. Soon we are all wondering why so many folks are talking "genocide" when no OFFICIAL person has said anything about it. Words are powerful tools when used properly, or improperly!

 

I don't want to digress into a separate subject, however I would like to mention something with regards to the discussion specifically dealing with the UN (as opposed to the US).

The situation in Yugoslavia was finally resolved not as a result of UN resolution or actions. It was resolved by the US pushing NATO into the fray and bombing TV stations spewing propaganda, roads/bridges carrying Milosovic's troops, etc.

Although I think they acted much too late (unfortunately Bush Sr. hid clear evidence of Milosevic's direct involvement for years), they still acted -- without the UN.

I just wanted to point that out since there seems to be this law (?) in some people's mind that its either the UN or nothing.

The UN is unfortunately makes a sloth look like an F1 car. Sometimes a little bit of common sense goes a long way.

 

22 September 2002

Clare Short, the International Development Secretary, today delivered her most powerful warning yet about the dangers of going to war against Iraq, putting new pressure on the Prime Minister as he prepares to make his case for military action in Tuesday's emergency Commons debate.

In an interview with GMTV this morning, Ms Short said: "We cannot have another Gulf war. We cannot have the people of Iraq suffering again. They have suffered too much. That would be wrong."

Her remarks follow those of Robin Cook, Leader of the Commons, who warned Tony Blair not to back unilateral US military action.

Mr Blair's attempts to build a consensus within the Commons will be further frustrated by the publication of an inconclusive dossier of evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Government insiders admit the document will neither link Saddam Hussein's regime to al-Qa'ida and the 11 September terror attacks nor prove that he has a nuclear bomb. Ministers say it will not quell growing dissent over the threat of war, which is even taking hold among some prominent Conservatives. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the Conservative former foreign secretary, said he had serious concerns about unilateral action. "I can see very powerful advantages in regime change in Iraq, but I would be reluctant to see the United States going in by itself or with just the United Kingdom or a handful of other countries."

Ms Short, speaking on the Sunday programme said: "We have to find a way of enforcing, quite rightly, UN resolutions. Saddam Hussein should be frightened, and the elite around him. We should frighten them.

"We should be ready to impose the will of the United Nations on them if they don't co-operate, but not by hurting the people of Iraq.

"Each one of them is as precious as the 3,000 people in the twin towers. We can't sacrifice them to putting it right," she said.

While a groundswell of British opinion builds up around the need for UN backing for military strikes, Baghdad issued a statement making clear it would not co-operate with any new UN Security Council resolution that ran contrary to an agreement reached with the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan.

The statement, issued after a meeting of Iraqi leaders chaired by Saddam Hussein, is being seen by the US and British governments as an act of defiance and further evidence that the Iraqi leader cannot be trusted. It came only days after Iraq had offered to allow UN weapons inspectors – withdrawn in 1998 – unconditional access in Iraq.

The Iraqi declaration came as the US forces commander Tommy Franks said in Kuwait that his forces were "prepared to do whatever we are asked". He insisted, however, that no final decision had been taken. And, just days before publication of Mr Blair's 55-page dossier – seen as vital in persuading the public and hostile MPs that action must be taken – Whitehall sources admitted it is "not a magic wand".

In Washington, one of the key pieces of "evidence" in the Bush administration's case for military action was being questioned by a number of leading US scientists. Both governments, however, are said to be "confident" that there has been a shift of opinion in favour of military action.

Even so, the British government appreciates a continuing need to "go out and make the case", especially in the run-up to the Labour Party conference in Blackpool next week.

Though the dossier is expected to show an increase in Iraq's chemical and biological weapons capability and claim evidence of a nuclear programme, government sources admit it is unlikely to sway all the doubters. "We can only make our case. It is not in our power to determine what others make of it," one said.

 

If you cannot read the whole text just read that.... and stop talking about war... this is a womlan and a UK minister a country that is the US closest ally and yet she is not blind... she talked with her heart and conscience becayse she knows that this war is criminal...

Ms Short, speaking on the Sunday programme said: "We have to find a way of enforcing, quite rightly, UN resolutions. Saddam Hussein should be frightened, and the elite around him. We should frighten them.

"We should be ready to impose the will of the United Nations on them if they don't co-operate, but not by hurting the people of Iraq.

"Each one of them is as precious as the 3,000 people in the twin towers. We can't sacrifice them to putting it right," she said.

 

'We didn't raise our sons to fight. But we know it will happen'

The movie channel at Baghdad's most expensive hotel, the Al-Rashid, shows Tom Berenger playing a CIA agent hunting terrorists who have acquired chemical weapons. In the city centre, men watch Sport TV and cheer Manchester United. There is a Britney Spears concert on a giant video screen at the Black and White, one of the more fashionable restaurants.

Yet no one appears to doubt that this country will be at war with the United States and Britain within a few months. And the same people watching the film and the football declare they will fight the Western invaders. Some say this to toe the official line, but many because they mean it.

The Iraqi capital is, at the moment, a strange and surreal place. Normal life continues on the surface, but there is fatalism not far below. People go through the routine with the knowledge that it is going to be turned upside down in the near future. They will lose friends and relations, they say, and may even die themselves.

The last time I saw Khalid and Rahima Abbas was during a visit to Iraq more than 18 months ago. Khalid is a qualified engineer, but in this crippled economy there is little chance of getting a job befitting his qualifications. At the age of 39, he works as a car mechanic, an assistant at a hardware store and a private tutor.

He has been working 12 hours a day, six days a week, while Rahima has taken cleaning jobs to enable them to move from a single-bedroom apartment to one with two bedrooms. We sit drinking chai in the tiny living room, where photos of the children, Selim, 19, Saied, 16, and Sultana, 14, hang on the wall.

Rahima says she is savouring what little time is left before the bombs and bullets start flying. During the Gulf War, and again when US and British aircraft attacked during Operation Desert Fox in 1998, she had insisted on kissing her husband, two sons and daughter every single morning as they left home. Her 17-year-old niece was killed in Baghdad during the Gulf War by a misplaced American bomb, which also badly injured the girl's father.

"I always feared that, by the time the day was out, something could have happened to one of us. It is silly, but it felt like a form of insurance kissing them goodbye," she says. "I haven't started doing that yet, partly because they're older now, and the boys get embarrassed ... But also because it will make them realise how afraid I am becoming."

Khalid agrees that it is best not to do anything that will frighten the children. What will happen will happen, soon enough. His side of the family, too, has suffered in Iraq's violent history. A brother was crippled, and a half-brother killed, in the war against Iran.

"I am too busy working and that occupies my mind," he says. "But whenever I stop to think, I do get very worried, not just about the war, but what will happen afterwards. Everything we have struggled to gain in the last 10 years could be ruined."

It is a very brave or very foolish Iraqi who would talk totally candidly about Saddam Hussein, and Khalid is neither. He does not want his views on "regime change" aired in public, but he does not believe that it is the real goal of the Americans to rid Iraq of its ruler.

"It is the oil. That is what they want. The inspection is just an excuse. When we let them back in, George Bush will find another reason to hit us. But none of us understand why Britain is going along. What is Tony Blair's motive?" asks Khalid, who supports Tottenham Hotspur on Sports TV and once hoped to take a master's degree at a British university.

"A war will cause so much damage. The killings will be not only by the Americans, but internal. This is a country with lots of feuds and a lot of guns. Iraq will fall apart, and there will be terrible consequences for all our neighbours."

There is little overt sign of security, let alone military preparations, in the streets of Baghdad. When the Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, announced at an international anti-war conference that Iraq was prepared to readmit the United Nations weapons inspectors, we walked into the hall without our ID being checked or our bags searched.

A few bored-looking young conscripts guard the ministries; an anti-aircraft gun on the approach to one of Saddam's palaces is unmanned. Does this mean that the Iraqi government is growing more confident that the conflict can be avoided, I ask a senior official? Oh no, he reassures me, there is little doubt that the Americans are itching for an excuse to bomb.

The main "excuse", of course, is the alleged development of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons by the Iraqi regime. Journalists are taken to a few sites named by Washington and London as the production centres. But they are the same ones for each batch of the media. We are assured by Mr Aziz that there will be fresh ones on display this week, in time for Mr Blair's much-trailed "dossier" on weapons of mass destruction.

Outside the Al-Rashid there's a giant banner saying "Tourism is the way future [sic] for man and land to build together." It is the "Second Iraqi Tourist Week", and seven "tourism advisers" sit at two tables to welcome visitors in further broken English to "Baghdad, Capital of glory and civilisation inspit of American aggressive threats to hit Iraq, and you well come".

There are not many tourists, but the city appears to be prosperous and buzzing. There are more foreign businessmen and diplomats than ever before since the Gulf War. In the hotel shops, Saddam Hussein watches made out of gold-plated martyrs' Kalashnikovs have gone up from around $120 to $170, and are selling well. There are also more local entrepreneurs around in their fake Versace, a sign that some, at least, are prospering despite the UN sanctions.

The anti-war conference has an interesting fringe element. At a previous one, I found myself chatting to a Frenchwoman who, I subsequently discovered, was Jany Le Pen, wife of the French right-winger. This time I share a lift with Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the hard-line Russian leader. "How many more colonies do the Americans want?" he growls. A hotel porter remembers the visit, two months ago, of Jörg Haider, the Austrian right-winger, who apparently was a lousy tipper.

The restaurant is full of customers sampling the local delicacies such as mazgouf, a smoked fish from the Tigris, French and Lebanese wines, and 12-year-old Scotch. It is, of course, only a few who can afford such luxury. The vast majority of people in Baghdad, and elsewhere in Iraq, have seen their living standards plummet. What links all of society together is preparing for the coming conflict. At the Al-Mansour hospital, director Dr Luay Qasha talks about stocking up with blood supplies, fluids, antibiotics; at the Mother of All Battles Mosque with minarets shaped like Scud missiles, the Imam urges the faithful to be resilient; at the football match between the Air Force and Baghdad FC, supporters ask journalists: "Why do Britain and America want to bomb us?"

Back at the Abbas home, Rahima looks out of the window at the gathering dark. "We have all tried hard to make sure our children get a good education. We didn't want our sons to grow up knowing how to fight. But now we are afraid that is what is going to happen."

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=333275

George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld are wilfully ignoring the realities of the Middle East. The result can only be catastrophic

Years ago, in a snug underground restaurant in downtown Tehran, drinking duq – an Iranian beverage of mint and yoghurt – Saddam Hussein's former head of nuclear research told me what happened when he made a personal appeal for the release of a friend from prison. "I was taken directly from my Baghdad office to the director of state security," he said. "I was thrown down the stairs to an underground cell and then stripped and trussed up on a wheel attached to the ceiling. Then the director came to see me.

" 'You will tell us all about your friends – everything,' he said. 'In your field of research, you are an expert, the best. In my field of research, I am the best man.' That's when the whipping and the electrodes began."

All this happened, of course, when Saddam Hussein was still our friend, when we were encouraging him to go on killing Iranians in his 1980-88 war against Tehran, when the US government – under President Bush Snr – was giving Iraq preferential agricultural assistance funding. Not long before, Saddam's pilots had fired a missile into an American warship called the Stark and almost sunk it. Pilot error, claimed Saddam – the American vessel had been mistaken for an Iranian oil tanker – and the US government cheerfully forgave the Iraqi dictator.

Those were the days. But sitting in the United Nations General Assembly last week, watching President Bush Jr tell us with all his Texan passion about the beatings and the whippings and the rapes in Iraq, you would have thought they'd just been discovered. For sheer brazen historical hypocrisy, it would have been difficult to beat that part of the President's speech. Saddam, it appears, turned into a bad guy when he invaded Kuwait in 1990. Before that, he was just a loyal ally of the United States, a "strong man" – as the news agency boys like to call our dictators – rather than a tyrant.

But the real lie in the President's speech – that which has dominated American political discourse since the crimes against humanity on 11 September last year – was the virtual absence of any attempt to explain the real reasons why the United States has found itself under attack.

In his mendacious article in this newspaper last week, President Bush's Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, also attempted to mask this reality. The 11 September assault, he announced, was an attack on people "who believe in freedom, who practise tolerance and who defend the inalienable rights of man". He made, as usual, absolutely no reference to the Middle East, to America's woeful, biased policies in that region, to its ruthless support for Arab dictators who do its bidding – for Saddam Hussein, for example, at a time when the head of Iraqi nuclear research was undergoing his Calvary – nor to America's military presence in the holiest of Muslim lands, nor to its unconditional support for Israel's occupation of Palestinian land in the West Bank and Gaza.

Oddly, a very faint ghost of this reality did creep into the start of the President's UN address last week. It was contained in two sentences whose importance was totally ignored by the American press – and whose true meaning might have been lost on Mr Bush himself, given that he did not write his speech – but it was revealing nonetheless. "Our common security," he said, "is challenged by regional conflicts – ethnic and religious strife that is ancient but not inevitable. In the Middle East, there can be no peace for either side without freedom for both sides." Then he repeated his old line about the need for "an independent and democratic Palestine".

This was perhaps as close as we've got, so far, to an official admission that this whole terrible crisis is about the Middle East. If this is a simple war for civilisation against "evil" – the line that Mr Bush was so cruelly peddling again to the survivors of 11 September and the victims' relatives last week – then what are these "regional challenges"? Why did Palestine insinuate its way into the text of President Bush's UN speech? Needless to say, this strange, uncomfortable little truth was of no interest to the New York and Washington media, whose wilful refusal to investigate the real political causes of this whole catastrophe has led to a news coverage that is as bizarre as it is schizophrenic.

Before dawn on 11 September last week, I watched six American television channels and saw the twin towers fall to the ground 18 times. The few references to the suicide killers who committed the crime made not a single mention of the fact that they were Arabs. Last week, The Washington Post and The New York Times went to agonising lengths to separate their Middle East coverage from the 11 September commemorations, as if they might be committing some form of sacrilege or be acting in bad taste if they did not. "The challenge for the administration is to offer a coherent and persuasive explanation of how the Iraq danger is connected to the 9/11 attacks" is about as far as The Washington Post got in smelling a rat, and that only dropped into the seventh paragraph of an eight-paragraph editorial.

All references to Palestine or illegal Jewish settlements or Israeli occupation of Arab land were simply erased from the public conscience last week. When Hannan Ashrawi, that most humane of Palestinian women, tried to speak at Colorado university on 11 September, Jewish groups organised a massive demonstration against her. US television simply did not acknowledge the Palestinian tragedy. It is a tribute to our own reporting that at least John Pilger's trenchant programme – Palestine is Still the Issue – is being shown on ITV tomorrow night, although at the disgracefully late time of 11.05pm.

But maybe all this no longer matters. When Mr Rumsfeld can claim so outrageously – as he did when asked for proof of Iraq's nuclear potential – that the "absence of evidence doesn't mean the evidence of absence", we might as well end all moral debate. When Mr Rumsfeld refers to the "so-called occupied West Bank", he reveals himself to be a very disreputable man. When he advances the policy of a pre-emptive "act" of war – as he did in The Independent on Sunday last week – he forgets Israel's "pre-emptive" 1982 invasion of Lebanon which cost 17,500 Arab lives and 22 years of occupation, and ended in retreat and military defeat for Israel.

Strange things are going on in the Middle East right now. Arab military intelligence reports the shifting of massive US arms shipments around the region – not just to Qatar and Kuwait, but to the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. American and Israeli military planners and intelligence analysts are said to have met twice in Tel Aviv to discuss the potential outcome of the next Middle East war. The destruction of Saddam and the break-up of Saudi Arabia – a likely scenario if Iraq crumbles – have long been two Israeli dreams. As the United States discovered during its fruitful period of neutrality between 1939 and 1941, war primes the pumps of the economy. Is that what is going on today – the preparation of a war to refloat the US economy?

My Israeli colleague Amira Haas once defined to me our job as journalists: "to monitor the centres of power". Never has it been so important for us to do just that. For if we fail, we will become the mouthpiece of power. So a few thoughts for the coming weeks: remember the days when Saddam was America's friend; remember that Arabs committed the crimes against humanity of 11 September last year and that they came from a place called the Middle East, a place of injustice and occupation and torture; remember "Palestine"; remember that, a year ago, no one spoke of Iraq, only of al-Qa'ida and Osama bin Laden. And, I suppose, remember that "evil" is a good crowd-puller but a mighty hard enemy to shoot down with a missile.