Quit the insults or this thread will be closed !
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Quit the insults or this thread will be closed !
The problem is that no one in the UN, especially the permament members really want UN to be effective all the time. Just when it suits them.Quote:
Originally Posted by Woodeye
For UN to be truly effective as a authority, it would need a completely indepedant military force capapable of kicking everybody's arse in to the stone age, and that wont happen, ever.
Majority desitions in the security council would be good, and the veto right away from everyone.Quote:
Originally Posted by janneppi
But without a real force behind it, bigger UN operations can only be conducted against countries US doesn't like. ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Tomi
Maybe so, but in sanctions and things like that, also the credibility of us is getting smaller day by day because of Iraq, that might effect their future politics too, after the monkey is out.Quote:
Originally Posted by janneppi
This thread has been an adventure. I have no idea where to begin. Gannex, your words are taken with great respect. Your take on the situation is pretty close to how I would have broke it down, EXCEPT I do not put down the American's role in screwing up the peace as anything but just ineptness. I see no bile, no EVIL in this. It was my thoughts before the invasion occured that the Bush's hadn't thought about the peace, and how to make it happen. Your assessment of the British rule in the south is DEAD on the money. I always felt if Canada had the troops and the moxy, we could have done a similar job as we are much more used to dealing with peacekeeping operations.
I guess what drew me to this thread, was the constant excuse that Bush is an idiot, liar, cheat, moron, fool. I don't think he is any of those things, but nor would I want to defend his administration. Lets just say, as Gannex has pointed out, America has made a lot of mistakes here. Agwii and other Americans to their credit have not take me to task for pointing that out, but I guess where I have to draw the line is that I do not feel it is an inherit desire to do things wrong that put Bush in this mess. I don't feel he is a war criminal nor do I feel this constant effort on the part many to give Saddam Hussein's role in this an equal status with Bush is wrong.
If we can agree that Bush has screwed the peace up, we can agree. If we think the motives are a war for oil ,as Stan believes, then I think that is naive and wrong, so lets go there.
To say that the US invaded Iraq to "Get oil" or "make money" is a fallacy. This war is costing so much in cash that the US economy is not gaining anything out of this war. Maybe the military suppliers of ammunition, rockets, military vehicles are making out like bandits, but taking 250000 people out of the US economy to fight a war is not doing much to make economic growth. Nor is the US getting oil. When I see the platitudes of the American left, and others out there that "he is in it for the oil" I cringe.
Bush believed in his heart of heart, that the intellegence leading him there was right. It looks foolish now, but the fact is it is the same evidence that the opposition in Congress were given and the majority of the Democratic party voted to give Bush the power to go to war took it. Bill Clinton had this same information when he was threatening the Saddam regime in 1998. Tony Blair believed it, and contrary to what people think, Tony and George should not have been bosom buddies. Tony is a center-left politician in the mold of Bill Clinton. That is what sold me on the motives of this war. If Tony was believing Iraq was a threat, I felt then it should be taken seriously. 50 other leaders agreed as well. Not one of them is personally going to gain by this war by getting the oil. The oil merely is a means to generate money for the new government in Iraq to pay for the infrastructure afterwards. Lets face it, someone has to pay for the broken bridges, the roads torn up, the power plants removed. The dirty little secret is the US treasury and others but mainly the US would have to pay for this. Since Saddam was doing little for the Iraq infrastructure, i would humbly suggest no matter what their faults, the US has overseen more building for the good of Iraq in the last 4 years than Saddam did in 20 years. Iraq may be paying for it though oil sales, but at least it is getting done. No, this was not a war for oil. Naive simple solutions and slogans sound nice but are not the truth.
The World economy needs oil. Finland, Canada, the US, Australia, wherever you want to look, a modern economy is dependent on oil. If Saddam had kept the oilfields of Iran that he wanted in 81, the fields in Kuwait, maybe Dubai or Saudi if he was left unchecked, he would put the squeeze on the oil reserves of the world in a way that would make people cry. That was his goal IMO. OF course, it wasn't going to happen because the Americans are very aware what a shock would do to the world's economy. Sure they would be helping themselves in the process, but lets face it, the functioning of the world economy benefits everyone, not just the Americans. So now that we look further down the road, Saddam is cornered. The UN is trying to get him to understand that the world wants him to comply with this 14 resoulutions. He doesn't , the US calls his bluff, and the war is on. The point has NEVER been made how the US gains in the oil game. It cant, for they are not seizing the oil. They are protecting it, but Iraq to this day is getting the money from the oil. The US treasury really isn't. Not to a profit in any stretch. The oil is just merely secured to not shock the world's economy. Hardly a bad motive, since an quiver in the world price of oil would hurt the economy. Oil prices have spiked, but not just American multi nationals have benefited, so have the nations of OPEC. That lovely fellow in Venezuela down there who sounds like Eki is making money hand over fist. I would wager that he is a big a winner from this mess as anyone. The only people NOT making money on this are the US Taxpayer. This is not a war for oil people, it was a war based on the misapplied intelligence gathering ability of the CIA and war to take down a possible future threat to the world.
Saddam had at least 4 months to cache weapons around the country for possible insurgents. He had that long to secure any WMD's he may have had and ship them to Syria or wherever. I don't think he had the WMD's any more, but his refusal to admit this has never been explained. That is one reason I would have kept him around, to explain his wacky theory that he could continue to hide something he didn't have. Saddam had time if he HAD the weapons to put them in the hands of people no one would want holding nerve gas. Saddam was seen as a threat full stop. To play this moral equivlency game that Bush is just as evil is a pile of crap. The last time I looked, the US were not having as government policy the wilful slaughter of innocent people for the sake of killing people. At times, the US went out its way to avoid targeting Islamic shrines, mosques and the like, and thought was given to not attacking on Islamic holy days. They have tried in their own clumsy fashion to try to do the right thing. Does this make them the drunk piling into the school bus as Gannex implies? I don't know if I would put them down as Drunk. I put them down as a bad driver, but I dont' think you can say Bush is guilty of anything but incompetance in how he prosecuted the peace. He is guilty of being too quick to trust the wrong people. That is a question of incompetance, not evil intent. To put THAT up beside the actions of Saddam Hussein's wilful use of force on his own people in the most heinous ways is repugnant to any thinking person. Hussein was a war criminal. He was tried in a manner that all his victims never received, and while I am not a proponent of Capital punishment, Saddam got justice. Eki's steadfast refusal to see him as the thug he was is what drove me to debate him, and others.
Another few thoughts:
To also say it was a war to make Bush look better to the US voter, well lets just say if he never attacked Iraq, he wouldn't have the opposition at home he now has. He would likely have made gains in Congress in 04, since his approval rating in the days after 9/11 was so high, if he had done nothing more than go after Bin Laden, he would have been far further ahead. He has lost the ground his party had worked so hard to gain. The Republican party has lost ground in Congress, and will likely lose the presidency. Yet Bush wont let go. I guess that is a sign of political naivety, and he is guilty of that.
I found it interesting to see Cindy Sheehan's name in this thread. Ms Sheehan is ....well I wont call her a traitor, as Agwii has, for I think being wrong is not traitoress. She is a pawn, a pawn of the hard left in the US. She is a willing pawn to be sure, but she has used her son's memory as a political weapon and that makes her more distasteful than you can imagine.
Simplistic slogans, solutions and ideas don't work in world geo-politics. The UN should be redone. Maybe have an associaition of democracy. Establish a standard for membership based on principles of freedom and having a nation having open and democratic elections. It wouldn't be a slam dunk Pro US group to be sure, but at least, hold nations in this membership to a higher standard, and establish a set of goals to be achieved before force is applied. Have debate amongst world leaders in an open forum to air grievances and set agenda's for the free world. This is the idea the UN was supposed to have, but then membership was established to all nations equally. Then a Security Council was added. We know the flaws in both of these ideas don't we? The Security council is deadlocked because two of the members that have veto's no real interest in democratic rights or freedoms. The General membership is close to 200 members of which at least 100 plus are autocratic regimes or worse who often use their vote to just gang up on two members, the US and Israel. Nothing happens of use, and diplomacy and words are the means to an end. That is the greatest failure of this story. As bad as Iraq is, the real loser in this was Kofi Annan. A man who had a son involved in breaking the "oil for food" embargo. The UN and Annan have been proven to be useless to say the least. In almost every humanitarian emergency in this world, the US has done far more than the UN. It pains me to say that, because I live in a nation that lived with the fantasy that the UN knows what it is doing. Canada has been the most eager participant in peacekeeping operations, and believes in the idea of a UN.
No, I think that as bad as Bush's actual running of the peace in Iraq has been, the true ineptness of the UN has been exposed once again. As we have spent days bickering here, people are dying in Darfur and no one is willing to step in. The UN wont even go in because, like Eki, they believe no nation should interfere in another nation's affairs under no circumstance period. Even if there is mass death and genocide. Nice principle to try to keep as people are clearly suffering. Of course, China has vetoed any effort in the Security Council to step in, since they are most of the evil things people would attribute to Bush and the US. They are getting their oil out of Sudan and I would argue Darfur is China's cheap oil campaign. That is, China is using their own motives at the expense of the world doing something about Darfur. Woodeye I think put it best. They should spend 2 hours condemning the obvious and 2 weeks doing something about it as opposed to two weeks arguing about it and 2 hours doing something. That sums up the UN.
The world needs a UN that works. The current one? The world needs this UN like a fish needs a bicycle.
Hussein’s Voice Speaks in Court in Praise of Chemical Atrocities
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/09/wo..._r=1&th&emc=th
By JOHN F. BURNS
Published: January 9, 2007
BAGHDAD, Jan. 8 — The courtroom he dominated for 15 months seemed much smaller on Monday without him there to mock the judges and assert his menacing place in history.
But the thick, high-register voice of Saddam Hussein was unmistakable. In audio recordings made years ago and played 10 days after his hanging, Mr. Hussein was heard justifying the use of chemical weapons against the Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s, predicting they would kill “thousands” and saying he alone among Iraq’s leaders had the authority to order chemical attacks.
In the history of prosecutions against some of the last century’s grimmest men, there can rarely have been a moment that so starkly caught a despot’s unpitying nature.
On one recording, Mr. Hussein presses the merits of chemical weapons on Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, his vice-president, and now, the Americans believe, the fugitive leader of the Sunni insurgency that has tied down thousands of American troops. Mr. Douri, a notorious hard-liner, asks whether chemical attacks will be effective against civilian populations, and suggests that they might stir an international outcry.
“Yes, they’re very effective if people don’t wear masks,” Mr. Hussein replies.
“You mean they will kill thousands?” Mr. Douri asks.
“Yes, they will kill thousands,” Mr. Hussein says.
Before he was hanged Dec. 30 for offenses in another case, Mr. Hussein had used the so-called Anfal trial, involving the massacre of as many as 180,000 Iraqi Kurds, as a platform for arguing that the chemical weapons attacks of the kind that devastated the town of Halabja on March 16, 1988, were carried out by Iranian forces then fighting Iraq in an eight-year war.
But the recordings told another story. Court officials gave no hint as to how they obtained the recordings, which Iraqis familiar with Mr. Hussein’s voice said seemed to be authentic. But they appeared to have been made during meetings of his Revolutionary Command Council and of the Baath Party High Command, two groups that acted as rubber stamps for his decisions. Mr. Hussein regularly ordered meetings to be recorded, according to Iraqis who knew the inner workings of Mr. Hussein’s dictatorship.
Mr. Hussein sounds matter of fact as he describes what chemical weapons will do. “They will prevent people eating and drinking the local water, and they won’t be able to sleep in their beds,” he says. “They will force people to leave their homes and make them uninhabitable until they have been decontaminated.”
As for the concern about international reaction, he assures Mr. Douri that only he will order the attacks. “I don’t know if you know this, Comrade Izzat, but chemical weapons are not used unless I personally give the orders,” he says.
When Iraq resumed the genocide trial of its former leaders on Monday, Mr. Hussein’s high-backed, black vinyl seat at the front of the dock was left ominously empty. Something about the six remaining defendants, including Ali Hassan al-Majid, Mr. Hussein’s cousin, who was known among Iraqis as Chemical Ali for his role in overseeing the attacks on the Kurds, suggested that they felt orphaned without the commanding presence of Mr. Hussein.
Gone were the cries of “Mr. President!” as Mr. Hussein entered the court to join them in the dock, and gone, too, was the emboldened posture they took from Mr. Hussein, with frequent challenges and insults to witnesses, prosecutors and judges. Perhaps Mr. Hussein’s hanging, and the humiliating taunts he endured from witnesses and guards as he stood with the noose around his neck, had broken the last illusions among those surviving him that they could somehow evade a similar end.
When the chief judge, Muhammad Ureibi al-Khalifa, began the proceedings by abruptly cutting the microphone as Mr. Majid stood to intone a prayer in memory of Mr. Hussein, the former dictator seemed to be judicially, as well as existentially, dead. But the anticlimactic beginning swiftly gave way to the most astonishing day of testimony since Mr. Hussein and his associates went on trial. Once more, it was Mr. Hussein, this time in an involuntary orgy of self-incrimination, who dominated.
In the sequence of scratchy recordings — some with the dialogue quite clear, some barely decipherable — Mr. Hussein repeatedly showed the ready resort to brutality that seized Iraq with fear during his 24 years in power. At one point, he is heard telling a general to summarily execute field commanders who fail to adequately prepare their defenses against Kurdish guerrilla raids.
He cites as a precedent “some commanders who abandoned their positions when they found themselves in an awkward situation, who deserved to have their necks cut, and did.” At another point, he tells subordinates to execute any internal security officials who fail to stop Iraqi soldiers sneaking home from the Iranian front on fake passes.
“If you arrest any of them, cut off their heads,” he says. “Show no mercy. They only joined the security to avoid having to join the army and fight Iran.”
One recording revealed, more clearly than anything before, Mr. Hussein’s personal involvement in covering up Iraq’s attempts to acquire unconventional weapons, the program that ultimately led to President Bush sending American troops to overthrow him. Talking to the general who led Iraq’s dealings with United Nations weapons inspectors until weeks before the 2003 invasion, he counseled caution in the figures being divulged on the extent of Iraq’s raw supplies for chemical weapons, so as to disguise the use of unaccounted-for chemicals in the attacks on the Kurds.
But it was Mr. Hussein’s chilling discussion of the power of chemical weapons against civilians that brought prosecutors and judges to the verge of tears, and seemed to shock the remaining defendants. One of the recordings featured an unidentified military officer telling Mr. Hussein that a plan was under development for having Soviet-built aircraft carry containers, packed with up to 50 napalm bombs each, which would be rolled out of the cargo deck and dropped on Kurdish towns.
“Yes, in areas where you have concentrated populations, that would be useful,” Mr. Hussein replies.
Another recording involves a General Thabit, who was not further identified by the prosecutors, telling Mr. Hussein that his forces had used chemical weapons in the northern sector of Kurdistan, but that “our supplies of the weapons were low, and we didn’t make good use of the ones we had.” The general notes that Iraq’s production of mustard gas and sarin, a nerve gas, was “very low,” and says they should be used sparingly. “We’re keeping what we have for the future,” he says.
Before they recovered enough to begin pleading their innocence, Mr. Hussein’s erstwhile companions in the dock buried their heads in their hands, gazed at the floor, and glanced furtively toward TV cameras transmitting live coverage of the trial. Mr. Majid shifted uneasily in his seat as one recording had him telling officials to warn Kurdish refugees that they would be attacked with chemical weapons if they attempted to return to their villages.
The prosecutor, Munkith al-Faroun, came to court as almost the only person who attended Mr. Hussein’s execution on Dec. 30 to emerge with an unsullied reputation. It was he, as he and others confirmed, who attempted to halt the taunts hurled at Mr. Hussein as he stood with the noose around his neck, moments before the trapdoor opened. Over the hubbub, an illicit camera phone recording showed Mr. Faroun calling out for silence, “Please, no!” he said. “The man is about to be executed.”
But back in the courtroom, Mr. Faroun became, again, the man holding Mr. Hussein to account and, in one poignant moment, counseling restraint among those who have expressed outrage over the manner of the former ruler’s execution. That moment came after the court watched television images taken after the Halabja attack, which more than any other event focused world attention on the atrocities committed under Mr. Hussein.
The video showed the horrors: a father wailing in grief as he found his children lying along a street littered with bodies; dead mothers clutching gas-choked infants to their breasts in swaddling clothes; young sisters embracing each other in death; and trucks piled high with civilian bodies. “I ask the whole world to look at these images, especially those who are crying right now,” Mr. Faroun said, referring to the outpouring of sympathy for Mr. Hussein.
The recordings played at Monday’s trial session, seemingly eliminating any doubt about Mr. Hussein’s role in the attacks on the Kurds, may go a long way to answering criticism of the government for executing him before he was judged for the worst of his crimes.
American justice department lawyers, who have done much of the behind-the-scenes work in sifting tons of documents and other evidence gathered after the invasion of 2003, had never hinted that they held the trump card, judicially and historically, that the audio recordings seem likely to be.
If it's not oil then what are they exporting to US as 50% of Irag's export 2005 was to USA https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications...k/geos/iz.htmlQuote:
Originally Posted by Mark in Oshawa
It ever occur to you that the US was paying world price for the oil? Did it occur to you that Iraq might have agricultural products of some sort? I suspect most of it is oil but even if it was ALL oil, if the US wants oil, Canada and Venezuela could sell the US that same oil easier, and likely cheaper than this mess in Iraq has cost. The reason the oil may be going to the US is more due to the vagries of how the oil commodities market works than any government policy.Quote:
Originally Posted by DonJippo