Bush = Dumb Ass
POSTED BY: Succatash
UPDATED: Friday, August 20, 2004 04:20
VIEWED: 16362
PAGE 6 of 12
WaddleDoodle, nobody said that we MADE the WMD here, what I said was "we sent the MATERIALS to make them". We also sent equipment and provided the "ground truth" in use against Iran. Did you not read my post? Or did you really misrepresent me on purpose? What a stupid effing article to bring up.
However, if you want, you may look up the facts:
www.cooperativeresearch.org/
globalissue/usforeignpolicy/iraq1980scontent.html
EDITED TO ADD: Since the issue was the USA's involvement in supplying WMD materials to Iraq- NOT the supply of conventional weapons- why don't you do us all a favor and eliminate 90% of your previous post as being off-topic? Save us all some scroll-time, and we can focus on the part of your post that is relevant.
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Quote:
Originally posted by rue:
Geezer,
Do you also claim that Iraq is FREE and DEMOCRATIC when the basics of national policy were shoved down their throats by Bremer and the CPA? Whether YOU or I think these are good things is beside the point - it supposed to be Iraq's decision.
You're right!
We should release Saddam and let him get back to work rebuilding his 50 palaces.
How much freedom did Iraqi's have during Saddam? Do they have more now??? Will they have more in the future???
************************
Fact Sheet
Past Repression and Atrocities by Saddam Hussein's Regime
For over 20 years, the greatest threat to Iraqis has been Saddam Hussein's regime -- he has killed, tortured, raped and terrorized the Iraqi people and his neighbors for over two decades.
When Iraq is free, past crimes against humanity and war crimes committed against Iraqis, will be accounted for, in a post-conflict Iraqi-led process. The United States, members of the coalition and international community will work with the Iraqi people to build a strong and credible judicial process to address these abuses.
Under Saddam's regime many hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result of his actions - the vast majority of them Muslims.
According to a 2001 Amnesty International report, "victims of torture in Iraq are subjected to a wide range of forms of torture, including the gouging out of eyes, severe beatings and electric shocks... some victims have died as a result and many have been left with permanent physical and psychological damage."
Saddam has had approximately 40 of his own relatives murdered.
Allegations of prostitution used to intimidate opponents of the regime, have been used by the regime to justify the barbaric beheading of women.
Documented chemical attacks by the regime, from 1983 to 1988, resulted in some 30,000 Iraqi and Iranian deaths.
Human Rights Watch estimates that Saddam's 1987-1988 campaign of terror against the Kurds killed at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 Kurds. o The Iraqi regime used chemical agents to include mustard gas and nerve agents in attacks against at least 40 Kurdish villages between 1987-1988. The largest was the attack on Halabja which resulted in approximately 5,000 deaths. o 2,000 Kurdish villages were destroyed during the campaign of terror.
Iraq's 13 million Shi'a Muslims, the majority of Iraq's population of approximately 22 million, face severe restrictions on their religious practice, including a ban on communal Friday prayer, and restriction on funeral processions.
According to Human Rights Watch, "senior Arab diplomats told the London-based Arabic daily newspaper al-Hayat in October [1991] that Iraqi leaders were privately acknowledging that 250,000 people were killed during the uprisings, with most of the casualties in the south." Refugees International reports that the "Oppressive government policies have led to the internal displacement of 900,000 Iraqis, primarily Kurds who have fled to the north to escape Saddam Hussein's Arabization campaigns (which involve forcing Kurds to renounce their Kurdish identity or lose their property) and Marsh Arabs, who fled the government's campaign to dry up the southern marshes for agricultural use. More than 200,000 Iraqis continue to live as refugees in Iran."
The U.S. Committee for Refugees, in 2002, estimated that nearly 100,000 Kurds, Assyrians and Turkomans had previously been expelled, by the regime, from the "central-government-controlled Kirkuk and surrounding districts in the oil-rich region bordering the Kurdish controlled north."
"Over the past five years, 400,000 Iraqi children under the age of five died of malnutrition and disease, preventively, but died because of the nature of the regime under which they are living." (Prime Minister Tony Blair, March 27, 2003) o Under the oil-for-food program, the international community sought to make available to the Iraqi people adequate supplies of food and medicine, but the regime blocked sufficient acce
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Oh wow, they found one shell. You know, if that sarin had not been deteriorated those soldiers (and everyone around for a few miles downwind) would be dead. Ditto "the" shell of mustard gas. I guess it really needed 130,000 troops to disarm Iraq!
We didn't invade Iraq because of "all of those UN resolutions" that they ignored. Do you really not remember the long presentation that Colin Powell made before the UN, or the fact that we "knew" that Iraq had WMD ready to deploy in 45 minutes?
Wow, I guess I agree with Rue, I'm not going to bother cleaning up the stuff you plopped all over this thread.
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edited
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Quote:
Iraq is better off without Saddam, no matter what you write, there's no way to dispute that removing Saddam, his sons, and the regime hasn't made life better in Iraq.
"Let the Iraqi's decide" you write.....so by that logic we should have let FRANCE decide for itself as to whether or not we should have helped them recapture their country from the Germans in WW2? And no, the FREE FRENCH and Gen. de Gaul DON'T COUNT. The governemt in place was the Vichy government who would have said "No thanks" and the frogs would STILL be croaking in German.
Sure the Vichy government was installed by the Germans in a coup, Saddam achieved power through a coup also. Guess the French SHOULD have been left to their own devices...
Bush lied about WMD.
Thousands of Iraqis were killed.
Hundreds (nearly 1,000 to date) of Americans were killed.
Hepatitis E and typhoid are sickening uncounted numbers - due to a lack of clean water. http://www.iraq.net/displayarticle5004.html
The infrastructure is still a wreck, unemployment is over 50%, random violence and kidnapping make everyday life risky. Infant and child mortality have not improved from Hussein's days.
Iraqis have been disenfranchised by the US (rather than Hussein). Hussein is no longer the source of misery and fear - generalized poverty and violence are. Imagine if the US had treated post-WWII France the same way we did Iraq by 'liberating' their natural resources to benefit our business interests. Iraq is not WWII France, despite your strained analogy.
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does the argument of semantics distract from knowing right from wrong? right from wrong is a deeply personal viewpoint isnt it? as much as i try to balance the cold logic of the necessary with the passionate ferver of morality, i still cant make the equation balance. maybe things like this arent meant to be quantified and codexed and measured? maybe it is the weakest of humans who picks the lesser of two evils without striving to carve out a third, better option?
unlike some of you i find myself without answers or retorts; only questions that there are no answers for. the things you have quoted, the references cited... has it made any difference ultimately? debate is not necessarily action, is it?
i feel like a drowning man grasping for solid ground. how long before the euphoria of the final gasp?
i love my country and my fellow americans with a great love, which is why sometimes i cannot stand what we have become. we: you and me.
as a child i was told that we were founded by heroes yearning for freedom. later i learned that what we are today is built upon the misery and sufferring of other peoples. how can we be good if this is true?
i just dont know anything anymore. i have no answers. no arguments. no defenses. nothing. you can say what you will. about me, about my thoughts. what will it acomplish?
ray
“With the first link the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, changes us all irrevokably. The first time any man’s freedom is trodden on, we are all damaged."
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hi
While there are things that bush stands for that i do not agree with and i don't truly know enough about Kerry to make an educated vote what has truly disenfranchised me is the way we go about things.
everytime I've heard a political discussion among folk it either turns into a love letter towards a pirticular candidate with the other side being bashed by people who all agree with one another, or practically a barroom brawl among those who don't agree. but even I have done a far amount of this sort of debate myself so i can understand the passion people throw into their opinions
I'm young and naive but once in while I'd truly like to see a politician say on national TV "I was wrong, let's try this now" or "I have changed my mind" espically when so much of the job of president isn't battling with the abhorrently evil or triumphing the ultimate good but instead dealing with the day to day finances where you can't help everyone but you try to set up programs to do the best you can.
But instead the solution in politics always seems to be either to stubbornly stick to your guns until the situation demands a change or to bash your opponant to make him look worse then you are.
surely there must be a way to hold to our ideals withoutm trodding on the ideals of others
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When people feel passionately about something, it DOES turn into a barroom brawl.
I'm not really for Kerry or pro-Democrat. I find MOST politicians in most parties to be venal, vote-swapping wheeler-dealers who have probably spent 0.001% of their time actually thinking about the good of the country. I can count principled politicians on the fingers of one hand: Feingold, Kucinich, McCain, Wellstone (before he died).
I didn't vote for Clinton and I'm going to hold my nose when I vote for Kerry. But right now I belong to that vast ABB Party (Anybody But Bush Party) because I find his Administration worse than venal, I find it to be actively working against democracy.
Unfortunately, fear-mogering works. If you can make people AFRAID of your opponent... especially if you can link your opponent to some external boogeyman... it gets more votes than if you run a positive campaign. Fear trumps hope every time.
One more comment that maybe sounds off-topic but isn't: I think Americans are hopeless and fearful. There was a time- you may be too young to remember- when we believed we could build a better world. What we've settled for is the capitalist view that life is just one long vicious dog-eat-dog battle. And the funny thing is that by believing this myth the only ones we are hurting are ourselves: average people who struggle for a few crumbs on the arena floor, failing to look up and see the people who have pitted us against each other.
What is so distressing is that the average Iraqi and the average American really have more in common than the issues that divide us. But we've been pitted against each other by lies and ideology and only Halliburton, KB&R and Bechtel are benefitting.
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Yes, I deny the claim that Iraq had current WMD relevant to US and regional security. Not only that, I could tell just settin' on my front porch rocking chair without any special knowledge on my part that the Bush administration knew it was all a dodge too.
I told people at work over and over, months before the invasion, that it had nothing to do with WMD, that it was all about the oil. (I admit I was partly wrong on that one- it was all about the oil and the reconstruction contracts.)
Furthermore, I wrote to Senator and told her so, only to receive a patronizing email saying
"Thank you for your letter about my vote for the Resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq....I voted for the Resolution because I believe it will...avoid war. I have been reassured by statements made by the President in his address to the United Nations on September 12th which conveyed a commitment to work with the U.N. towards that goal.... There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein and his arsenal of chemical and biological weapons pose a real and persuasive threat to the safety and security of the United States, the Persian Gulf, and the Middle East.... While the distance between the United States and Iraq is great, Saddam Hussein's ability to use his chemical and biological weapons against us is not constrained by geography... The great danger is a nuclear one. ... I continue to have serious concerns that there are those in the Administration who would seek to use this authorization for a unilateral, pre-emptive attack against Iraq.... " blah blah blah
I wish I was making this up. At the time, all I could think was "Stupid cow, she's so in love with the idea of being in the in-group that she can't do a common-sense analysis of the obvious."
I've been saying in many threads on this board that the reason why I have confidence in my view of the world is because it's so darn PREDICTIVE. Yes, I CAN predict things months in advance. Furthermore, I have a pretty good bullshit detector, and it's just so... hard... for me to give that all up in favor of blind ideology.
I'm not going to go into a long explanation of how I came to these particular predictions unless you want me to. However, I will make my predictions known as I develop them (stock market predictions too. In fact, the last comment that I got on my stock market predictions as of Wednesday was "You're sick". In the meantime, I've got my check-book at the ready.) and you can tell me whether I have a grip on reality or not.
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There is a thread called 'the demonization of the opposition' for those of you who have an interest. Be forwewarned, it is EXTREMELY long and comes at the topic from many directions..
Some of you posters seem young. I am old enough for Vietnam to have been my education. Until then I believed everything the government said and supported everything it did. We (I thought of myself as an American just like any other) were right and just, and stood for democracy around the world.
There was no one defining revelation that turned it around. It took years (literally) of listening to debates, reading articles, and watching news and documentaries. It brought home the gap between what the government said, and what it did. The notions that the government lies in order to do what it wants, that it doesn't stand for democracy and justice, and that the very powerful don't have your or my interests at heart even as they pawn our lives, is still, after all these years, something I have to remind myself about.
And my education is not nearly complete. Like SignyM, I believe those who can predict the result of complex systems and events have a better understanding than those who can't. And I am amazed by some of the people I deal with, who draw obscure conclusions and make valid predictions from their everyday, non-classified, non-privileged observations. I find their thinking to be deeply pragmatic and almost mechanical, in the same way evolution is. It can be mistaken for cynicism. But they continue to be predictive in a way that I, with my biases and blind spots, am not.
Some thing I have learned. I couldn't fathom WHY the US was so interested in Iraq. But I KNEW, from reading the text of speeches and following events, that there were no massive stockpiles of WMDs threatening the US. I predicted it months before the invasion, and I took a lot of heat for it.
Some things dumbfound me to this day. About 18 months after going into Afghanistan, with 9/11 still raw, bin Laden on the loose, and the words DEAD OR ALIVE !!! echoing in the air, how could the US could have been induced to forget him and turn to Iraq? It was as if bin Laden had never been.
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