Why do they hate us?

Waffling?

Many of us were against the war, but once it had begun supported the US and its allies winning the war as soon as possible, and with as little suffering as possible.

Now that the war is over, I believe it to be our duty as citizens to thoroughly examine whether or not the war was justified on the basis of the reasons given for the war....not on the basis of liberating the Iraqi people.

There is a difference. We cannot change the past, once the war began, those of us who opposed it couldn't change that, and for the sake of our soldiers and potential victims I had little choice to support a quick and winning effort.

How about the next potential war? That is the issue now.

Now is the time to think about the policy that exists, and ask whether or not it was the right policy, based on what we know now.

If we continue to evaluate all the evidence, and find that there was impropriety on the side of the administration, that they in effect misused their power to wage a war unlike others we have waged in this country...a war of aggressive defense, a war of instigation based on "potential" threat, unlike the actions in Afghanistan which were a direct response to an actual threat and action, isn't it right that we find out the truth, as much as the truth can be known?

There are questions that need to be asked, and unlike the Fox news mentality, I believe it is patriotic, and in the best interest of this country that we ask those questions. A full scale investigation needs to take place, if there are reasonable doubts. To do less is unpatriotic, and undemocratic.

Power left unchecked is a corrupting influence, and we must as a society never surrender our right to know out of some fear of the consequences for wanting to know.

KF may believe that the war was "just" and justifiable no matter what the real reason for the war, but I take issue with that shoot first....ask questions later approach when there was a claim of certainty of WMD....yet now a lack of proof.

The benefit of doubt is given to the current administration, and at the same time full doubt and scrutiny must be placed on our political leaders in order to keep them honest and hold them to the limits of their constitutional power.

Where there is the potential for corruption, and cross currents of motive and opportunity, it is imperative for not only this country, but the perceptions of other countries that we are squeaky clean in such an aggressive action as was seen in Iraq.

We waged war on a nation, on a regime of that nation out of concern for what they "might" do. This is a precedent that needs to be fully supported, both by fact and law, if we are to employ this policy in the future.....not by an end justifies the means attitude.

It is very dismaying to me that people are not more concerned with the USA doing what is right and proper according to principle, rather than just employing the "might makes right" and justification after the fact mentality that comes from them when you now question the WMD issues.

How would you feel if you found out that the "evidence" that convinced so many that our cause was right and just, was found to be tainted and manufactured?

 

"Justification after the fact"? I would not have supported the war had I not thought we had enough justification to enter into it to begin with.

How much more "evidence" do you need? Blix clearly stated Iraq not only had WMD but it had not all been accounted for. Even those countries that ended up opposing the war, i.e. France, stated beforehand that Iraq was a threat. Clinton and his administration (Albright et al) stated as much and even took (pathetic) actions as a result. Saddam was playing cat-and-mouse for years. If he had nothing to hide he would have been far more cooperative.

Bush did "what was right and proper according to principle," the principle being the security of this country and its citizens.

"Might makes right"? Well, fortunately our country has enough might to indeed protect itself, and that is right, IMHO.

Yes, it is necessary to question power and authority. But questioning should not automatically imply wrongdoing.

 

I was going to post this as a reply to max401 for his last post in the Lies and who said what thread, but this is ok here!

Read what you posted above and the what Blix said himself:

UN top inspector: We never asserted Iraq had any remaining weapons of mass destruction
Iraq-UN, Politics, 3/19/2003

"UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan ordered the withdrawal of all UN personnel, including UNMOVIC inspectors, after receiving information from the United Kingdom and United States regarding the continued safety and security of UN personnel in Iraq.

Blix, who is to discuss a work plan of remaining disarmament issues today at the Security Council, also said the inspectors had never asserted that Iraq had any remaining weapons of mass destruction, only that there were a lot of things unaccounted for.

This comes as statements made by US Secretary of State Colin Powell revealed that the US knew that a second UN Security Council Resolution was needed for any military action against Iraq, making the US aware that any military action against Iraq are illegal."

Questioning power and authority, is part of good citizenship as Oprional777 noted above.

Soooo, there is no need to label anyone who questions this administration's actions motives and story telling, as commies, anarchists. anti US etc...

 

Sooooo, there were a lot of things UNACCOUNTED FOR! Was Saddam the kind of guy you give the benefit of the doubt to?!? And why all the harassment and threats of those interviewed by the inspectors?!? The years of dodging the inspectors? The worst thing Bush could have done was to NOT take action, as the previous administration had (lobbing a few cruise missiles does not count).

And I'm not calling you, Optional, or anyone else here a commie, anarchist, etc.

Instead of rehashing the pre-war arguments and going around in circles and letting emotions run amok, I'll just say that you have every right to your view trader556, as do I.

Peace to you and yours.

 

Who's Accountable?

By PAUL KRUGMAN

NY Times - June 10, 2003


The Bush and Blair administrations are trying to silence critics — many of them current or former intelligence analysts — who say that they exaggerated the threat from Iraq. Last week a Blair official accused Britain's intelligence agencies of plotting against the government. (Tony Blair's government has since apologized for January's "dodgy dossier.") In this country, Colin Powell has declared that questions about the justification for war are "outrageous."

Yet dishonest salesmanship has been the hallmark of the Bush administration's approach to domestic policy. And it has become increasingly clear that the selling of the war with Iraq was no different.

For example, look at the way the administration rhetorically linked Saddam to Sept. 11. As The Associated Press put it: "The implication from Bush on down was that Saddam supported Osama bin Laden's network. Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks frequently were mentioned in the same sentence, even though officials have no good evidence of such a link." Not only was there no good evidence: according to The New York Times, captured leaders of Al Qaeda explicitly told the C.I.A. that they had not been working with Saddam.

Or look at the affair of the infamous "germ warfare" trailers. I don't know whether those trailers were intended to produce bioweapons or merely to inflate balloons, as the Iraqis claim — a claim supported by a number of outside experts. (According to the newspaper The Observer, Britain sold Iraq a similar system back in 1987.) What is clear is that an initial report concluding that they were weapons labs was, as one analyst told The Times, "a rushed job and looks political." President Bush had no business declaring "we have found the weapons of mass destruction."

We can guess how Mr. Bush came to make that statement. The first teams of analysts told administration officials what they wanted to hear, doubts were brushed aside, and officials then made public pronouncements greatly overstating even what the analysts had said.

A similar process of cherry-picking, of choosing and exaggerating intelligence that suited the administration's preconceptions, unfolded over the issue of W.M.D.'s before the war. Most intelligence professionals believed that Saddam had some biological and chemical weapons, but they did not believe that these posed any imminent threat. According to the newspaper The Independent, a March 2002 report by Britain's Joint Intelligence Committee found no evidence that Saddam posed a significantly greater threat than in 1991. But such conclusions weren't acceptable.

Last fall former U.S. intelligence officials began warning that official pronouncements were being based on "cooked intelligence." British intelligence officials were so concerned that, The Independent reports, they kept detailed records of the process. "A smoking gun may well exist over W.M.D., but it may not be to the government's liking," a source said.

But the Bush administration found scraps of intelligence suiting its agenda, and officials began making strong pronouncements. "Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons — the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have," Mr. Bush said on Feb. 8. On March 16 Dick Cheney declared, "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."

It's now two months since Baghdad fell — and according to The A.P., military units searching for W.M.D.'s have run out of places to look.

One last point: the Bush administration's determination to see what it wanted to see led not just to a gross exaggeration of the threat Iraq posed, but to a severe underestimation of the problems of postwar occupation. When Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, warned that occupying Iraq might require hundreds of thousands of soldiers for an extended period, Paul Wolfowitz said he was "wildly off the mark" — and the secretary of the Army may have been fired for backing up the general. Now a force of 150,000 is stretched thin, facing increasingly frequent guerrilla attacks, and a senior officer told The Washington Post that it might be two years before an Iraqi government takes over. The Independent reports that British military chiefs are resisting calls to send more forces, fearing being "sucked into a quagmire."

I'll tell you what's outrageous. It's not the fact that people are criticizing the administration; it's the fact that nobody is being held accountable for misleading the nation into war.

 

fwiw, my post was directed to the statement, not the author, and imo not at all diversionary -- the point being that the rumsfeldian-type of attitude (essentially boiling down to, if not in letter then in spirit: 'we will do whatever we want, and we don't care what you inferior people think - don't like it? too bad') is at least part of the reason for anti-Americanism.

surely anti-Americanism existed before rumsfeld, but arguably so did that type of attitude.

so, repeating:

as to the article, perhaps another way to look at it would be that anti-US hatred is an effect, rather than a cause, and that a willingness to believe the allegations of lying and distorting is also an effect of the same cause.

 

America's imperial delusion

The US drive for world domination has no historical precedent

Eric Hobsbawm
Saturday June 14, 2003


The present world situation is unprecedented. The great global empires of the past - such as the Spanish and notably the British - bear little comparison with what we see today in the United States empire. A key novelty of the US imperial project is that all other empires knew that they were not the only ones, and none aimed at global domination. None believed themselves invulnerable, even if they believed themselves to be central to the world - as China did, or the Roman empire. Regional domination was the maximum danger envisaged until the end of the cold war. A global reach, which became possible after 1492, should not be confused with global domination.

The British empire was the only one that really was global in a sense that it operated across the entire planet. But the differences are stark. The British empire at its peak administered one quarter of the globe's surface. The US has never actually practised colonialism, except briefly at the beginning of the 20th century. It operated instead with dependent and satellite states and developed a policy of armed intervention in these.

The British empire had a British, not a universal, purpose, although naturally its propagandists also found more altruistic motives. So the abolition of the slave trade was used to justify British naval power, as human rights today are often used to justify US military power. On the other hand the US, like revolutionary France and revolutionary Russia, is a great power based on a universalist revolution - and therefore on the belief that the rest of the world should follow its example, or even that it should help liberate the rest of the world.

Few things are more dangerous than empires pursuing their own interest in the belief that they are doing humanity a favour.

The cold war turned the US into the hegemon of the western world. However, this was as the head of an alliance. In a way, Europe then recognised the logic of a US world empire, whereas today the US government is reacting to the fact that the US empire and its goals are no longer genuinely accepted. In fact the present US policy is more unpopular than the policy of any other US government has ever been, and probably than that of any other great power has ever been.

The collapse of the Soviet Union left the US as the only superpower. The sudden emergence of a ruthless, antagonistic flaunting of US power is hard to understand, all the more so since it fits neither with long-tested imperial policies nor the interests of the US economy. But patently a public assertion of global supremacy by military force is what is in the minds of the people at present dominating policymaking in Washington.

Is it likely to be successful? The world is too complicated for any single state to dominate it. And with the exception of its superiority in hi-tech weaponry, the US is relying on diminishing assets. Its economy forms a diminishing share of the global economy, vulnerable in the short as well as long term. The US empire is beyond competition on the military side. That does not mean that it will be absolutely decisive, just because it is decisive in localised wars.

Of course the Americans theoretically do not aim to occupy the whole world. What they aim to do is to go to war, leave friendly governments behind them and go home again. This will not work. In military terms, the Iraq war was successful. But it neglected the necessities of running the country, maintaining it, as the British did in the classic colonial model of India. The belief that the US does not need genuine allies among other states or genuine popular support in the countries its military can now conquer (but not effectively administer) is fantasy.

Iraq was a country that had been defeated by the Americans and refused to lie down. It happened to have oil, but the war was really an exercise in showing international power. The emptiness of administration policy is clear from the way the aims have been put forward in public relations terms. Phrases like "axis of evil" or "the road map" are not policy statements, but merely soundbites. Officials such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz talk like Rambo in public, as in private. All that counts is the overwhelming power of the US. In real terms they mean that the US can invade anybody small enough and where they can win quickly enough. The consequences of this for the US are going to be very dangerous.

Domestically, the real danger for a country that aims at world control is militarisation. Internationally, the danger is the destabilising of the world. The Middle East is far more unstable now than it was five years ago. US policy weakens all the alternative arrangements, formal and informal, for keeping order. In Europe it has wrecked Nato - not much of a loss, but trying to turn it into a world military police force for the US is a travesty. It has deliberately sabotaged the EU, and also aims at ruining another of the great world achievements since 1945: prosperous democratic social welfare states. The crisis over the United Nations is less of a drama than it appears since the UN has never been able to do more than operate marginally because of its dependence on the security council and the US veto.

H ow is the world to confront - contain - the US? Some people, believing that they have not the power to confront the US, prefer to join it. More dangerous are those who hate the ideology behind the Pentagon, but support the US project on the grounds that it will eliminate some local and regional injustices. This may be called an imperialism of human rights. It has been encouraged by the failure of Europe in the Balkans in the 1990s. The division of opinion over the Iraq war showed there to be a minority of influential intellectuals who were prepared to back US intervention because they believed it necessary to have a force for ordering the world's ills. There is a genuine case to be made that there are governments so bad that their disappearance will be a net gain for the world. But this can never justify the danger of creating a world power that is not interested in a world it does not understand, but is capable of intervening decisively with armed force whenever anybody does anything that Washington does not like.

How long the present superiority of the Americans lasts is impossible to say. The only thing of which we can be absolutely certain is that historically it will be a temporary phenomenon, as all other empires have been. In the course of a lifetime we have seen the end of all the colonial empires, the end of the so-called thousand-year empire of the Germans, which lasted a mere 12 years, the end of the Soviet Union's dream of world revolution.

There are internal reasons, the most immediate being that most Americans are not interested in running the world. What they are interested in is what happens to them in the US. The weakness of the US economy is such that at some stage both the US government and electors will decide that it is much more important to concentrate on the economy than to carry on with foreign military adventures. Even by local business standards Bush does not have an adequate economic policy for the US. And Bush's existing international policy is not a particularly rational one for US imperial interests - and certainly not for the interests of US capitalism. Hence the divisions of opinion within the US government.

The key questions now are: what will the Americans do next, and how will other countries react? Will some countries, like Britain, back anything the US plans? Their governments must indicate that there are limits. The most positive contribution has been made by the Turks, simply by saying there are things they are not prepared to do, even though they know it would pay. But the major preoccupation is that of - if not containing - educating or re-educating the US. There was a time when the US empire recognised limitations, or at least the desirability of behaving as though it had limitations. This was largely because the US was afraid of somebody else: the Soviet Union. In the absence of this kind of fear, enlightened self-interest and education have to take over.

This is an extract of an article edited by Victoria Brittain and published in Le Monde diplomatique's June English language edition. Eric Hobsbawm is the author of Interesting Times, The Age of Extremes and The Age of Empire

www.mondediplo.com

 

Eric is an 84 year old die hard Communist from the old school -MSFE.

So invite him to SWITZERLAND and let him change your government, LOL.

 

harrytrader good info, better belongs ib kaymar's thread

Medical Educational Trust more than 200,000 direct kills in Irak haha "clean" war !
"The Unthinkable is Becoming Normal."

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0420-05.htm


"A study released just before Christmas 1991 by the Medical Educational Trust revealed that more 200,000 Iraqi men, women and children were killed or died as a direct result of the American-led attack. This was barely reported, and the homicidal nature of the "war'' never entered public consciousness in this country, let alone America. "

Worst :

"The Pentagon's deliberate destruction of Iraq's civilian infrastructure, such as power sources and water and sewage plants, together with the imposition of an embargo as barbaric as a medieval siege, produced a degree of suffering never fully comprehended in the West. Documented evidence was available, volumes of it; by the late 1990s, more than 6,000 infants were dying every month, and the two senior United Nations officials responsible for humanitarian relief in Iraq, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, resigned, protesting the embargo's hidden agenda. Halliday called it "genocide".

"As of last July, the United States, backed by the Blair government, was wilfully blocking humanitarian supplies worth $5.4bn, everything from vaccines and plasma bags to simple painkillers, all of which Iraq had paid for and the Security Council had approved. "

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18745

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