War is peace
POSTED BY: SignyM
UPDATED: Sunday, March 8, 2026 23:49
VIEWED: 7556
PAGE 2 of 8
I'm kind of waiting for Geezer to respond.
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I haven't read the new report so I'm basically just pulling together other bits of information from earlier in the summer right off the top of my head. At one point in time, the only evidence we had for the food for oil corruption came from Chalabi. There were two investigations. The one headed by Chalabi's people came up with the evidence but wouldn't share with the one headed by Bremer's people. Then their hard drive and all of their computer back-ups went down at the same time so they weren't able to verify the evidence. It just sounded hinky and, in hindsight, Chalabi probably wasn't the most reliable source. So I'm wondering if the new report made use of evidence that was in addition to that claimed by the Chalabi group.
On the other hand (and this may be the ugly American showing through in me 
) it's not too surprising that there would be corruption.
I'm shocked, shocked, that there would be corruption in a third world country. (said in my best Claude Rains impersonation).
The new administration rationale for invading Iraq (and, by extension, the new rationale being passed around the internet) - they didn't have WMD, they didn't have the infrastructure in place to create WMD, but they were going to get rid of the sanctions and then start working on creating the programs to build WMD - makes the threat from Iraq seem very distant indeed. Not imminent. Not immediate. Not impending. Not 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin and material for 500 tons of sarin. Not a mushroom cloud over one of our cities.
There are three kinds of people: fighters, lovers, and screamers.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
Yes, but do we invade nations because they have "plans" to have sanctions removed and then "potentially" further those plans to develop nuclear technology and then "maybe" WMD? Which BTW they would still need an intecontinental ballistic delivery system to be a threat to us.
Apparently we do. Not saying this is my rationale, but having just finished reading Churchill's history of WWII, I can understand how some could see Iraq as analogous to Germany in, say, 1937; starting to chafe at sanctions from the previous war, and getting ready to cause trouble. I can even imagine that if France and Britain had deposed Hitler then, that some of the same comments about "premature pre-emption" we see about Iraq would have been made.
BTW, an intercontinental delivery system could be as simple as a tramp freighter, or a conex.
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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Quote:
Originally posted by SoupCatcher:
I haven't read the new report so I'm basically just pulling together other bits of information from earlier in the summer right off the top of my head. At one point in time, the only evidence we had for the food for oil corruption came from Chalabi. There were two investigations. The one headed by Chalabi's people came up with the evidence but wouldn't share with the one headed by Bremer's people. Then their hard drive and all of their computer back-ups went down at the same time so they weren't able to verify the evidence. It just sounded hinky and, in hindsight, Chalabi probably wasn't the most reliable source. So I'm wondering if the new report made use of evidence that was in addition to that claimed by the Chalabi group.
On the other hand (and this may be the ugly American showing through in me
I'm shocked, shocked, that there would be corruption in a third world country. (said in my best Claude Rains impersonation).
The new administration rationale for invading Iraq (and, by extension, the new rationale being passed around the internet) - they didn't have WMD, they didn't have the infrastructure in place to create WMD, but they were going to get rid of the sanctions and then start working on creating the programs to build WMD - makes the threat from Iraq seem very distant indeed. Not imminent. Not immediate. Not impending. Not 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin and material for 500 tons of sarin. Not a mushroom cloud over one of our cities.
There are three kinds of people: fighters, lovers, and screamers.
There are several investigations going on, including the U.N.'s own one, headed by Paul Volker, former Fed chairman. Nothing is supposed to come from this one until mid-2005, and they are being very close-mouthed.
The Post has been busy since yesterday, though.
1,300 Oil Vouchers Begin to Tell Story
Hussein Courted A World of Nations, Firms, Individuals
By R. Jeffrey Smith and Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, October 8, 2004; Page A30
The immense scope of an Iraqi effort in the late 1990s to curry political support for ending an international trade embargo is reflected in a list of more than 1,300 oil "vouchers" that then-President Saddam Hussein gave to more than a hundred corporations, foreign officials and political parties stretching from North America to Asia, according to a report issued on Wednesday by the CIA's Iraq Survey Group.
The vouchers, which provided selective rights to buy Iraqi oil at a discount and to resell it for a huge profit, were provided to both mainstream and opposition political parties in countries such as Belarus, Russia, Ukraine and Yugoslavia; to oil companies in Turkey, Japan, Belgium, Italy, Canada and France; to an arms conglomerate in China; and to individuals in Switzerland, Jordan, the Netherlands, Russia, Malaysia and Burma, among others...
..."In the late '90s, we understood that lots of shenanigans were going on . . . under-the-table payments and so on, to curry favor and win support for eroding sanctions," said Robert Einhorn, a former assistant secretary of state. "We made various efforts to limit the scope of this," he added. But the report said that U.S. officials were blocked by Russia, China and France in 2000 and 2001 when they tried to clamp down on oil sales outside the oil-for-food program...
... Overall, 30 percent of the oil vouchers were issued to beneficiaries in Russia, including individual officials in the president's office, the Russian foreign ministry, the Russian Communist Party, members of the Russian parliament, and the oil firms Lukoil, Gazprom, Zarubezhneft, Sibneft, Rosneft and Tatneft.
Fifteen percent of the beneficiaries were French, including a former interior minister, the Iraqi French Friendship Society and the oil company Total. Entities in China received 10 percent of the vouchers, and entities in Switzerland received 6 percent, as di
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^^^ yea, because Saddam was so popular?
Oh, let's go help Saddam. Yea. Right.
The propoganda out of the USA, in the Washington Post no less (the paper that brought you Robert Novak - known CIA revealer and traitor) is really horrific.
The USA had set up Saddam and supported him for decades... now this? Pot, kettle... got some black for you.
Seems the Washington Post is now a fantasy magazine. Next it'll be elves and dragons helped Saddam.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Geezer:
I can even imagine that if France and Britain had deposed Hitler then, that some of the same comments about "premature pre-emption" we see about Iraq would have been made.
Isn't this a hindsight/20-20 kind of a thing? I think if they had deposed Hitler it would have been seen as premature. And why not? History is not a mechanical progression. You can't know what is going to happen in a year or two, or even a few months. Remember "The invasion of Iraq is gonna be a cakewalk?"
This argument verges on the whole free will/determinism debate. Don't you think that a democratic nation should base its policy desisions on the premise of free will?
In other news, a butterfly could have flapped its wings in China and Hitler might have failed at any number of points and never invaded Poland. Of course there were some pretty hateful forces in Germany at the time that embrased Hitler, so if Hitler hadn't rissen to power it's not totally unreasonable to imagine that some other loser-cum-politician could have lead the German people to do some very bad things. But damn, it seems the soul of arrogance to think you can predict these things and condemn thousands of people to die on probability.
I know it wasn't the greatest movie in the world but "Minority Report" was all about this kind of crazy. I keep wondering how that movie would be understood if it had come out this year. Seems to me the movie itself was in some ways premature.
And since we're on the subject, what about the dangerous forces alive in the U.S. today? Our Masters have made it quite clear that if anyone fails to oppose terrorism the way we want them to oppose terrorism we very likely might bomb the hell out of them and invade. When does the United State's beligerance become a big enough threat for the world to seek to depose our leaders?
HKCavalier
Hey, hey, hey, don't be mean. We don't have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.
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Winston Churchill had called up Roosevelt one day, early during what would later be called WWII. Roosevelt had asked Winny; "what should we call this war"?
He answered: "The Unnecessary War".
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Quote:
Originally posted by HKCavalier:
Isn't this a hindsight/20-20 kind of a thing? I think if they had deposed Hitler it would have been seen as premature. And why not? History is not a mechanical progression. You can't know what is going to happen in a year or two, or even a few months.
I see it more in terms of the old Santayana quote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". Historically, tyrants and dictators left alone to build their forces generally end up causing no end of trouble. Some might think it better to stop them before they get too big.
Quote:
Remember "The invasion of Iraq is gonna be a cakewalk?"
Well, the invasion part was a cakewalk. It's just the occupation that's been a problem.
Quote:
And since we're on the subject, what about the dangerous forces alive in the U.S. today? Our Masters have made it quite clear that if anyone fails to oppose terrorism the way we want them to oppose terrorism we very likely might bomb the hell out of them and invade. When does the United State's beligerance become a big enough threat for the world to seek to depose our leaders?
I have to say that I find this a pretty unlikely scenario for the future(the bombing the hell out of and invading part). We're about as extended militarily as we can get, and even if we had the forces, I don't think that the electorate would go for another round. We'd just take care of deposing our own leaders at the ballot box, as we've been doing for the last couple hundred years.
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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Quote:
Historically, tyrants and dictators left alone to build their forces generally end up causing no end of trouble. Some might think it better to stop them before they get too big.
SO let me get this straight... if we had invaded Germany, deposed Hirohito, invaded China and killed Mao and his cadre, invaded Italy and killed Moussilini, and bumped off Stalin then things would have been much different. And you're right! All we had to do was invade six or seven nations and we'd all have been OK. (But then, what about Hungarian Nazi collaborator Ferenc Szalasi and French Henri-Philippe Petain, and all of the other native right-wing/ Nazi party leaders?)
The point is that at any moment, there are literally DOZENS of "potential" enemies. So while we were invading Iraq, N Korea and Iran were busy forwarding their nuclear plans, and Pakistan and India have certainly not held still with theirs. And what about Brazil? It refuses to let in the IAEA. What about Israel? It's an open secret that they have nuclear and CWA capability. What about S Korea? THEY were conducting forbidden enrichment experiments just recently. And Russia?? Just think of the tons of nuclear material floating around, and all those underemployed physicists and biologists...
How many nations should we invade because we "think" they "might" become a major problem "some time" in the future?
But speaking of learning lessons from history, our current mess in the Middle East would be much less messy if we had killed off the Taliban and Saddam, weakened the flow of Saudi oil(y) money to the terrorists and... oh wait, we supported those guys didn't we?
The point of THAT is we let our policy be swayed by corporations, and we seem almost invariably to promote despotic structures that promise cheap resources and/or cheap labor. We never seem to learn the lesson that if we had encouraged structures that did not actively exploit their own people and create extreme differences in wealth, the world would be a MUCH more stable place today.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
SO let me get this straight... if we had invaded Germany, deposed Hirohito, invaded China and killed Mao and his cadre, invaded Italy and killed Moussilini, and bumped off Stalin then things would have been much different. And you're right! All we had to do was invade six or seven nations and we'd all have been OK.
Actually, we (the WWII Allies) did have to invade, liberate, or bomb into rubble six or seven countries just to deal with Hitler, Hirohito, and Mussolini. Some of those countries belonged to our allies, and got pretty messed up before we chased the Axis out. Churchill seemed to think that a couple of shows of strength, nothing close to a full-on invasion, could have checked Germany and Italy in the '30s. Might have been worth a try.
Quote:
The point is that at any moment, there are literally DOZENS of "potential" enemies. So while we were invading Iraq, N Korea and Iran were busy forwarding their nuclear plans, and Pakistan and India have certainly not held still with theirs. And what about Brazil? It refuses to let in the IAEA. What about Israel? It's an open secret that they have nuclear and CWA capability. What about S Korea? THEY were conducting forbidden enrichment experiments just recently. And Russia??
Just have to prioritize.
Or maybe we should do what you'd have preferred with Iraq and continued to let the UN handle it. The UN is handling it, Right? Quote:
The point of THAT is we let our policy be swayed by corporations, and we seem almost invariably to promote despotic structures that promise cheap resources and/or cheap labor. We never seem to learn the lesson that if we had encouraged structures that did not actively exploit their own people and create extreme differences in wealth, the world would be a MUCH more stable place today.
I doubt that you and I will ever agree on the neo-colonialist thing. I'm sure we're less that lily-white, but I'd say less grey that most developed countries. My time machine needs a new widget, but without being able to go and check, I'd bet we aren't going to get any real commercial benefit out of Iraq. If we're lucky we'll leave them with a more-or-less democratic government and an army well-trained enough to keep the insurgency down to a dull roar.
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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