Posts by James Bremner
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Michael,
Mischievous and cynical, and slightly batty as well. Your last post really goes a bit far in the conspiratorial direction; you are getting into tin foil hat country with that one!!Putting aside the cost and the lives lost (both Iraqi, US and other MNF), do you really think it was part of Bush's plan for the war in Iraq to drag on and cost his party both Houses of Congress?
Put the tin foil hat down. Back in the real world ....
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Simon,
As an outspoken supporter of deposing Hussein and trying to build a decent country in Iraq, yes, I do feel responsibility for the chaos and carnage in Iraq. I am very disappointed and frustrated with the way things have turned out to date, I am mad as hell at the Bush Administration for the mistakes they have made. War is always a messy and uncertain business full of difficult decisions, but that is no excuse for some of the dumb-ass mistakes that have been made.Allowing the Iraqi Army to disband (however it happened or whoever made the decision) was insane, and obviously so at the time, not just with hindsight.
The Iraqi Army and more US troops should have been used to bring law and order, or to not let it get out of hand to start with. Looters should have been shot, not ignored.
Why is Moctada Al Sadr still breathing? He was obviously a trouble maker and should have been taken out a long time ago.
Why did the US back off Fallujah the first time, and why did they wait for 6 or 9 months before going back in to clean it out?
Why did the most recently announced change in tactics and focus in and around Baghdad not happen a long time ago?
All these mistakes are inexcusable and maddening and piss me off more than I can say (or politely express in a post!!)
However, I also feel some responsibility for the fact that Hussein and his sick motherf@#ker sons are not terrorizing Iraqis anymore. No more gang raping women in front of their families, no more feeding people feet first into industrial plastic shredding machines in front of their families. No more putting people in baths of concentrated acid in front of their families.
No more mass graves. No more persecution of the Kurds. No more Halabjahs. No more invasions of Iraq’s' neighbors. No more likelihood of Saddam reconstituting his WMD programs. No more active cooperation with and funding of a multitude of Middle Eastern terrorist organizations.
I feel good that according to Newsweek, Iraq’s' economy is booming. I feel good that Iraq's free floating currency the Dinar, is appreciating in value, a real show of confidence in the future of Iraq by the millions of people who buy and sell the currency.
I feel good about the constitution, the elections, and the political process (however flawed and halting it is at the moment).
I feel good that soon Iraq will have a tonne of oil money to use for its reconstruction
I feel good that, despite the far too many missteps and problems and the deaths of far too many civilians, that Iraq has hope, it has a future. Iraq had no hope and no future under Hussein.
I have to say, Simon, that I feel responsible in part and pretty damn good about all of those things.
I also feel pretty good that 25 million people in Afghanistan are no longer subjected to the backward primitive medieval Islamism of the Taliban.
I am happy that women are not beaten in the street if they accidentally show a wrist or ankle (oh, the horror and perversion!!). I feel good that Afghan girls can go to school
I feel good that Hamid Karzi is probably the most popular politician in the world; with a recent approval rating of 91% and that the multi national forces in Afghanistan had an approval rating by Afghans of 75%.
Like Iraq, Afghanistan has hope; it has a future that it didn't have before, however difficult the path.
I will also tell you what I don't like and don't feel good about.
I don’t like the nauseating selective morality and hypocrisy of so many on the left who seek to hold the US to an impossibly high standard of perfection in everything it does, while almost completely ignoring horrendous acts by many other people and countries. This I find truly sickening.
So many seem to be more concerned with seeing the US and Bush fail in Iraq and Afghanistan so they can say "I told you so" than with the welfare and future of Iraqis and Afghanis.
Where is the hairy armpit brigade (feminists) in praising and supporting the new found freedom of Afghani women and girls? Sure, Afghanistan is not perfect for women and girls by any means, but it is so much better. While Islamists treat women as no better than chattels that can be beaten at will and shouldn't be educated, Afghani women can now vote and go to school.
Where are all those who devote so much energy and anger to Iraq on the issue of Dafur? Just about no where to be found. China is blocking any UN action on Dafur so its supply oil from Sudan is not disrupted. China truly is trading blood for oil and where are the protests against China?
Where are those on the left on the issue of North Korean refugees? Hundreds of thousands of North Korean refugees have made it across the border from the Stalinist left wing pure hell of North Korea to China, but if China finds them, it simply hands them back to North Korean authorities, which is a death sentence. This is in contravention of its obligations under a UN treaty on refugees that China signed. Where are the human rights organizations on this issue? I mean to say, two and a half million North Koreans starved to death in the mid to late 1990s and where was the noisy left on this? Where are the protests? Where is the UN? No where, that’s where.
A hell of a lot more people are suffering a hell of a lot worse in Sudan and North Korea than in Iraq, and where are all the left wing blowhards who know so much and care so much and like to think of themselves as the moral conscience of the world? No where, that is where. It is not just hypocritical, it is absolutely bloody pitiful, it really is.
If those of us who supported the removal of Taliban and Hussein regimes are responsible for the deaths and chaos in Iraq (fair enough), then the left wing hypocrites who don’t lift a finger about Sudan and North Korea are responsible for the many, many more deaths and much greater suffering in those countries.
Simon, I hope you understand that, too.
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Simon,
Who made the following statement and when?"Again in Wichita, November 17, XXXX said that what happens in Iraq "matters to you, to your children and to the future, because this is a challenge we must face not just in Iraq but throughout the world. We must not allow the 21st century to go forward under a cloud of fear that terrorists, organized criminals, drug traffickers will terrorize people with chemical and biological weapons the way the nuclear threat hung over the heads of the whole world through the last half of this century. That is what is at issue."
ChimpyBushHitler or Dr. Evil Dick Cheney, or maybe Mad Dog Rummy in 2002 or 2003, right?
Maybe someome from the Likud party because of course "we all know" that the US is a mere puppet of Israel don't we?
How about someone from the US and UK oil companies, because they needed to build up the pretext for getting their hands on Iraqs oil, because "everybody knows" that Iraq was all about oil don't we?
No, try Bubba Billy Clinton in 1997. So Billy Boy was in on the conspiracy cooked up in Texas too? Hot diggedy dog, what do you know!!
And it was to prevent the US$ from crashing aswell, another thing that we "all know" don't we?
In 1998, Clinton signed into law a law that made regime change in Iraq official US government policy, but didn't act on it. All Bush did was act on it
It was the consensus of US intelligence in the 1990s and early 2000 that Saddam still had WMDs and his goal was to shake off the sanctions so he could go back to a full WMD program (see the Duefler report I linked to in a previous post). Over 2/3rds of the US House and Senate voted in favour of invading Iraq because they believed this too. Are they all in on the conspiracy as well?
It turned out that the US intelligence services were wrong in their estimates, but since when is intelligence to a "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard. It can never be to that standard because the other guys don't want you to know the true situation, so they do everything they can to hide the true situation from you. You have to get the best info you can and make the best decision you can. What else is a country supposed to do?
In the previous two decades, the CIA was famous not for over estmating, but for under estimating and missing key events altogether. The CIA had no clue that the Berlin Wall was about to fall down. The CIA had no clue that Iraq had an advanced nuke program when the first Gulf war happened. The CIA missed Pakistan and India's nuke weapons programs altogether.
So if you were a politician or leader and the CIA told you that a country had WMDs, what would you believe? Based on the past performance of the CIA, I would believe that the country probably had a lot more bad stuff than the CIA knew of.
And post 9/11, the level of what was considered a risk that needed to be addressed was, for obvious reasons, dramatically lowered. Nobody wanted to not address potential threats again, as had been the case with Al Qaeda, with disasterous consequences.
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From today's editorial in the Times of London.
"In reality, there is no credible alternative. The Iraq Study Group proved rather better at setting out the many problems that exist in Iraq than in offering precise solutions. Its recommendation that the White House co-opt Iran and Syria as its allies in Iraq does not look remotely plausible. The idea that suddenly withdrawing American soldiers from the country would convince Shia and Sunni hardliners to be more charitable to one another is equally improbable. Mr Bush’s domestic foes, notably Nancy Pelosi, the new Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives (who has a minimal record in foreign policy) and the increasingly surreal Edward Kennedy, would simply abandon Iraq and be done with it."
"This is not a course that the United States can afford to take. Mr Bush’s decision involves serious risks and it is inevitable that more American soldiers will die as a result of being sent to dangerous sections of Baghdad. Nor is this destined to be a wildly popular announcement at home. It is right, nevertheless, to make one more effort to create the sort of Iraq that its people deserve and the vast majority of its citizens aspire to. These are the appropriate means to what is a noble end."
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So Mr. Eager Beaver thinks that the Iraq invasion was all about protecting the US dollar was it! That is just too stupid to be true; I mean to say you couldn't make this stuff up!!
The Euro /US exchange rate moves on interest rate differentials more than anything else, and the strength and prospects (or not) of the US economy will determine the strength (or not) of the US dollar.
Iraq could trade oil in Euros, pesos, or toilet paper and it would not make a jot of difference to the US$. Iran has said recently that it is going to change from using the US$ to Euros for its oil transactions and a number of countries have recently said they are going to diversify their reserves and has the US$ crashed? That would be “no”, it hasn’t. Mr. Eager Beaver is financial and economically illiterate to believe such patent nonsense. Sadly, he is not alone.
As for "letting Bin Laden go" so that the military wouldn't be tied down in Afghanistan so they could go invade Iraq, what nutty paranoid conspiracy theory will be next?
It would take an enormous post to rebut the many erroneous "points" made and all of Mr. Eager Beaver's breathless conspiracy theories and I don't have the time and / or inclination to do so, and frankly dealing with such stupidity is an exercise in frustration. It is like trying to potty train my 16 month old son.
By all means, let’s take the Occam's razor perspective on OBL.
After 9/11 the US was just utterly stunned and shocked, and yes, pissed and vengeful. Numero Uno bad guy was Osama, the desire for his blood was overwhelming, and fair enough too, the bastard killed nearly 3000 innocent people.
The idea that Bin Laden was let go at Tora Bora so the military could continue to get ready for Iraq could only come from someone who is very far removed from reality. There is just no way any less than 95% of the US population, military or not, Dem or Repub or not wanted to do anything else other than see OBL captured or preferably blown to smithereens. The 5% who didn’t were the super nutty far left who were holding “Peace ins” and saying we needed to “reach out” to Osama and ”resolve root causes”. Pardon my French, but “f#@k that”, what a load of insane drivel. Anyone who does anything like 9/11 or Bali or Madrid or London needs and deserves to be removed from the face of the earth.
It was a mistake to rely on the local Afghan militias to get Bin Laden, and a very bad one. The Occam's razor perspective would lead one to believe in a cock-up, not a conspiracy.
The US military had originally come up with a plan to invade Afghanistan post 9/11 was a very conventional one that involved something like 50,000 troops that would have taken months to build up with their equipment. Rummy & Bush said, "that's bullshit", come up with something much faster and the CIA came up with their plan to use spooks and special forces with the Northern Alliance guys that was so much faster, and with the exception of missing Bin Laden, very effective. The US took out the Taliban in a few weeks when the Soviets had gotten their asses handed to them over a decade in Afghanistan. Whether the US was relying on Pakistan or Afghan militias to block off the back door from Tora Bora, I don't know. Whatever the strategy was, it was a huge, huge mistake.
But if you want to look at huge intelligence and tactical failures and cock-ups, just look at WWII, it is full of them. They happen all the time in war, as post April 2003 Iraq shows. My father always used to say that 9 out of 10 things that look like a conspiracy are usually a cock-up, and my knowledge of history and observations of the world around me leads me to agree with this perspective.
In the meantime here is UNSC 1441, it is necessary to go back to that time and see what people were thinking and agreeing about Iraq. Remember it passed 15 - 0.
http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N02/682/26/PDF/N0268226.pdf?OpenElement
It focuses on Iraqi non-compliance with previous UN sanctions and at the time I recall it was generally understood that it constituted legal authority for military action.
It was a huge, huge mistake to submit to Blair's request to try to get a second resolution that focused on the supposed active WMD programs. It led everyone to forget 1441 and allowed the critics to say "liar, liar pants on fire!!" when the intelligence that the US, the UK, France, Russia, Egypt, Israel and Jordon had on active WMD programs turned out to be inaccurate. Everyone seems to forget that every intelligence service in the world that had any interest in Iraq believed that Hussein had WMDs and or WMD programs
I read a number of military blogs and late last year I read a post from an US Army EOD guy in Anbar province (Explosives & Ordinance Destruction) who said that in late 2006 he was still coming across WMD precursor material in Iraq.
For 12 years Hussein sure as hell behaved like someone with something to hide and Blix looks more like Inspector Clouseau than someone to trust on an issue like this one. Post 9/11 who the hell would trust either of them? Al Qaeda / Taliban / Afghanistan sure blew out of the water the idea that bad guys could be "contained in their boxes" and that the presumption of safety and security was the right attitude for the US to take.
The only way to find out for sure whether Hussein had WMDs was to take the bastard out, which was also the humanitarian thing to do, bearing in mind the nature of his regime.
Here is the Duelfer report on Iraq's WMDs. Scroll down and read the key findings. In a post 9/11 world, what Duelfer says about Hussein's activities and intent is more than enough reason to justify taking the bastard out.
https://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/iraq_wmd_2004/index.html
More on Iraq and oil later. I need to do some work for a change.
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Mikey Savaloy,
Language young man, language!!
You are to be congratulated!! Based on your comments, apparenlty you can fit your head, complete with blinkers, up your you know what!! (just joking Russell, just joking)
Best wishes from NOLA (really!)
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Mark, your quote
"As for the Iraqis now benefitting from their own oil, if anyone believes that I have a big grey bridge I'm selling shares in and can let you all in on the ground floor...reeeeal cheap!"
"Al-Shahristani says he hopes to quickly make deals with major foreign oil companies, and use their advanced technology to help Iraq reach its huge potential."
http://www.iraqdirectory.com/DisplayNews.aspx?id=2873Al-Shahristani is Iraqs' Oil Minister and is a PhD and scientist who was tortured by Saddam and spent 10 years in Abu Ghraib for refusing to work on Iraqs nuke program in the 1980s and 1990s (read a book about him, "Brighter than the Baghdad Sun").
Do you think someone who had the balls to risk death and stand up to Saddam Hussein is just going to sit quietly while he and his country get screwed over? Compared with Saddam's tender mercies, nothing Exxon Mobil or the State Dept could offer or do to him would hold much for him to be concerned about. I think you are the guy who would be a taker for a condo development on the Auckland harbor bridge.
You must think Iraqis are all morons and dupes if they are all just going to sit by and let themselves and their counrty be screwed. Give them some credit, wont you?
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As far as who the "international left" is, it is a term I have heard used and use for brevities sake, to refer to the many organizations and people around the world that are active on particular issues and are of a left wing persuasion.
There are so many such organizations and people, International ANSWER, the ACLU, World Cant Wait, George Soros' One World group etc, to name only a very few. If you want to see a comprehensive listing of such groups and people, visit the following site.
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/default.asp
Many of these people and groups are very well funded and very active and effective, and as far as that goes, good on them. They work very hard and get their message across and have a major impact on the world. I don't have a problem with anyone expressing their rational, fact based views in an open and honest way. Unfortunately, many of these people and groups would short of that standard.
However, my biggest beef with these people and groups is that they focus almost all of their activity on attacking anything the US does or doesn't do, and not nearly enough time and effort protesting the many other much, much bigger problems and much worse situations around the world.
As the Iraqi PM said over the fuss over Saddam's hanging:
"In a speech on Saturday, a week after the hanging, Mr. Maliki showed that he remains as angry as the Americans. Hitting out at governments and human rights organizations around the world that have condemned the hanging, he said they were hypocritical. “We’re wondering where these organizations were during the crimes of Anfal and Halabja,” he said, referring to Mr. Hussein’s persecution of Iraqi Kurds. “Where were they during the mass graves and the executions and the massacres that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis?”"
The answer to Maliki’s question is “no where”.
You could also ask where were those from the left when 2 1/2 million North Koreans were starved to death in the 1990s?
Where has the left been as North Korea has run a horrendously brutal police state as bad as anything Stalin did for something like 60 years?
Where were the anti Vietnam war protestors when thousands of Vietnamese were fleeing from the new Vietnamese "workers paradise" in rickety boats?
Where was the left when Pol Pot was killing 2 or 3 million Cambodians in his new "agrarian paradise"?
Where has the left been as Castro has run a brutal police state and run Cuba into the ground for the last 50 years? Where was the left when Che Guevara was killing thousands in cold blood?
Where is the left that is so concerned about women’s and gay rights in the west, as Islamic countries treat women as chattels, stone women to death for "adultery" which is most likely rape, sentence gays to death for being gay and conduct "honor killings"
Where is the left as China blocks any UN sanctions on Sudan over the ethnic cleansing in Dafur, so China flow of oil from Sudan is not interfered with?
Where was the left when Stalin and Mao were killing tens of millions?
Sadly, as far as I am aware, the answer to all of the above questions is "no where to be found".
When the left is consistent in its criticism and less the supreme hypocrites so many are today, and have been for decades, then their conceited moralizing will be much less painful than it is today, and perhaps even worth paying attention to.
Whoops, there goes another long post. Never mind.
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Great article by a liberal commentator on the silliness of the response of liberal critics to Saddams untidy execution. Talk about missing the wood for the trees.
I do go off on long posts, apologies to anyone who was bothered. But hey, that is one of the great things about this type of forum, if you don't want to read a post (or posts), just skip ahead to one you do!!
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May be the Dems are not such a bunch of naive patsies after all!!
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1167467674368&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull