The Fisk article does not raise any new stuff.
The US fed both Iran and Iraq (and the taleban, and the afghanis before) and many others.
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The Fisk article does not raise any new stuff.
The US fed both Iran and Iraq (and the taleban, and the afghanis before) and many others.
lolQuote:
Originally Posted by studiose
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark in Oshawa
I find it pretty hard to believe that a country of never-ending resources and intelligence services like USA didn't find Saddam "rabid" after he started butchering people right and left. It's understandable to defend your country and way of life, because you are in fact defending your own existance, but enough is enough. If you refuse to open your eyes to the role that USA is playing today and foolishly believe they aim to establish world peace then there is nothing more to say.Go watch Borat - it will tell you more about Americans than we all ever wanted to know.
A half-wit, according to agwiii.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tomi
Lol, very true, good and funny movie, it is both a comedy or tragedy, depends who is looking :)Quote:
Originally Posted by AndyPerry
If there's an element of truth in this, he stumbled on it by accident. :p :Quote:
Originally Posted by Eki
LOLQuote:
Originally Posted by studiose
Go watch "Night and Fog" to understand what Eki and the others in the FFL are supporting.Quote:
Originally Posted by AndyPerry
Oh come on! Nobody's laughing.Quote:
Originally Posted by agwiii
Maybe you should see one of Michael Moore's documents. Oh, but I'm sure you can't. Because those are all just full of lies and left-wing liberals, right?
Yes, the US has backed some awful people, including Saddam in the 1980's. That's because, in politics, there are usually no good options. You have to choose the least bad option, and in the 1980's, the least bad option was, arguably, to back Iraq, at least sufficiently to stop the place being taken over by Iran.
That is still the situation, in fact. The present government of Iraq is far from perfect. The army and police are infiltrated with militant Shiite militiamen who are running around killing innocent Sunni civilians. But we back the Iraqi government, not because the government is totally benign, but because there is no better option. Has Robert Fisk any better option to suggest? I bet not.
It's all very well for Fisk to complain about the US having backed Saddam, but what would he say the US should have done instead? Stayed out of the dispute between Iraq and Iran? That would have amounted to giving a green light to the Iranians to overrun Iraq, and when the US gives a green light to a nation bent on conquest, the first people to complain are the Robert Fisks of the world. So, as Mark said a few days ago, the US simply cannot ever do right in the eyes of its critics.
But to get back to another point that has been raised in the last day or two, and that is whether oil was the motivation for the Iraqi war. Stan says it was, and Mark pointed out that spending billions of dollars on a war for the right to pay prevailing market prices for Iraqi oil is one hell of a strange way of going about getting oil on the cheap. I'm not sure I buy that entirely, because the neocons who masterminded the Iraqi war fully believed that the war would be very cheap. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz's vision was of a very small, very high-tech force, quickly overcoming the enemy and establishing control. Large, expensive deployments of troops would be unnecessary and the oil revenue, it was thought, would pay for the re-construction of Iraq; this would be fairly cheap anyway, because the damage, it was naively believed, would be minimal. This over-optimistic assessment was prompted in part by the easy success in Afghanistan, where the high-tech, small force approach seemed to have worked well.
So I suggest that the Americans didn't think the war would be expensive, and they did believe that the oil revenue would defray the relatively small costs that would be incurred. They also believed that the war was a way to get, if not cheap oil, then at least a reliable supply of normally-priced oil. In that sense, one of the motives was indeed oil.
But I have two things to say about that: first, what is wrong with trying to secure a steady, reliable supply of oil? I know Mark made this point earlier, but I think it bears repeating, because Eki and Stan and most critics of the Coalition seem to think that all they have to do is point to oil as a motive for the Iraqi action and they have discredited the entire war effort. I reject that; it might be reasonable if oil were the ONLY motivation, though even then, reasonable people could differ, but I challenge you, Stan, to come up with any convincing argument that oil, and only oil, was the Coalition's reason for going to war.
Which brings me to my second point, and that is that the motivations for war, especially in a democracy like the United States, are NEVER simple. Hell, I can't even tell you why I got up this morning! Was it because I'd be bored if I stayed in bed, because I wanted the respect of my wife, who would be disgusted if I stayed in bed all day, because I needed the money from work, because I am just in the habit, because . . . I don't know. And so it is with the decision to go to war. Everyone who signed on to the decision, which is millions of people, signed on for his or her own reasons. For me, I supported it (with grave misgivings) primarily because I believed that Saddam, if not confronted, would eventually become the master of the entire Middle East, kill millions of people (including all Jews), control the world price of oil, and end up as a menace as big as Stalin had been a half century before. We had survived the Soviet threat; I didn't want to see one powerful monster replaced by another. Securing the oil supply was another motive for me, but certainly far down the list, and I suspect that was the case for most of us who supported the Iraqi action.