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Rice in Iraq: "This war came to us"
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee

Joined: 25 May 2003

Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 8:51 pm Post subject:

Apple Scruff wrote:

No matter what your ass-backwards logic for invading Iraq is, there is no denying that there are a number of other countries in the world that present a much greater threat to the U.S. than Iraq. This whole war, and the fact that there are still people who think they can justify it, is a farce.

the whole mideast the way it was was a threat to the US. changing Iraq was part of changing the mideast.

Wangja

Joined: 17 May 2004
Location: Seoul, Yongsan

Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 9:28 pm Post subject:

Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote:

Apple Scruff wrote:

the whole mideast the way it was was a threat to the US. changing Iraq was part of changing the mideast.

So the reasons for the invasion, in roughly chronological order, have been:-

he is non-compliant
he has WMD
he still wants WMD
he attacked WTC
to free Iraqis (the current popular one)

and is now to change the Middle East so it is no longer a threat to the US.

Bollox: and if that is truly the reason, why should MY countrymen die to remove a threat to YOUR country?

You don't need to answer that. I know what you will say anyway.

(Only the US held the sanctions line / only the US was prepared to do anything / the world is better without Saddam / how many would he have killed if he were out / etc etc ad nauseam)

Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee

Joined: 25 May 2003

Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 9:33 pm Post subject:

Quote:

?

it is probably a threat to your country too.

You don't need to answer that. I know what you will say anyway.

(Only the US held the sanctions line / only the US was prepared to do anything / the world is better without Saddam / how many would he have killed if he were out / etc etc ad nauseam)[/quote]

Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee

Joined: 25 May 2003

Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 9:33 pm Post subject:

Quote:

?

it is probably a threat to your country too.

Quote:

You don't need to answer that. I know what you will say anyway.

(Only the US held the sanctions line / only the US was prepared to do anything / the world is better without Saddam / how many would he have killed if he were out / etc etc ad nauseam)

How about Bin Ladenism , Bathism and Khomenism are what causes terrorists because they teach hate as it is the nature of those ideologies?

I am thankful for Englands' help but you as a citizen of England have to make your own decision. So you got to do what you have to do.

R. S. Refugee

Joined: 29 Sep 2004
Location: Shangra La, ROK

Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 10:19 pm Post subject:

Wangja wrote:

Bollox: and if that is truly the reason, why should MY countrymen die to remove a threat to YOUR country?

Your countrymen shouldn't have to die for the US and I certainly wish Blair had had the balls to say 'no' to Bush. As it was, Bush's poodle was obviously a nuetered one.

The two best possibilities, I think, for resisting Bush's maniacal drive for war, death, and destruction would have been for Britain to say no or for Colin Powell to have the balls to call crap on the whole charade and do a principled resignation. If both had happened, I find it very difficult to imagine that this obscene destruction of a country and its people would be taking place.

Cheers.

Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee

Joined: 25 May 2003

Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 11:13 pm Post subject:

Mass grave is uncovered in Iraq Victims believed to be 1,500 Kurds
By Associated Press | May 1, 2005

Quote:

BAGHDAD -- Investigators have uncovered a large grave in Iraq that may contain the bodies of 1,500 Kurds killed in the 1980s. It could produce evidence needed to prosecute ousted leader Saddam Hussein and his top lieutenants for mass killings during his regime.

Quote:

Outgoing Iraqi Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin, himself a Kurd, said half a million people perished and 182,000 are missing.

Quote:

Identification cards found on as many as 15 percent of the victims link them to Kurdish villages in northern Iraq. The clothing reinforces that those found in the graves were Kurds, Nivala said.

Investigators said that at least 63 percent of the victims were children or teens under 18.

Hussein and Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as ''Chemical Ali," are the main defendants facing charges for the Anfal campaign.

http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2005/05/01/mass_grave_is_uncovered_in_iraq_victims_believed_to_be_1500_kurds/

Last edited by Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee on Mon May 16, 2005 11:18 pm; edited 1 time in total

supernick

Joined: 24 Jan 2003
Location: Seoul

Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 11:18 pm Post subject:

Quote:

Your countrymen shouldn't have to die for the US and I certainly wish Blair had had the balls to say 'no' to Bush. As it was, Bush's poodle was obviously a nuetered one.

I don't think that Blair ever anticipated on actually joining the U.S. on invading Iraq. My guess is, is that he thought that with some united pressure on Iraq, Saddam would have come clean, but once it looked like that wasn't going to happen, then there was little choice. If Blair would have backed down it would have left the U.K and other countries in great danger. It was a very poor gamble. Blair is a good man but I'm sure he'll choose his friends a little more carefully in the future.

As for Rice, she can say what she wants, as it makes little difference as the war was a very elective war from the start. Joo can go on saying what he wants, but I'm sure this is the most unwanted and unjustified war the U.S. and the U.K. has engaged in in many years.

supernick

Joined: 24 Jan 2003
Location: Seoul

Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 11:25 pm Post subject:

Quote:

Quote:
Mass grave is uncovered in Iraq Victims believed to be 1,500 Kurds
By Associated Press | May 1, 2005

BAGHDAD -- Investigators have uncovered a large grave in Iraq that may contain the bodies of 1,500 Kurds killed in the 1980s. It could produce evidence needed to prosecute ousted leader Saddam Hussein and his top lieutenants for mass killings during his regime.

Quote:
Outgoing Iraqi Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin, himself a Kurd, said half a million people perished and 182,000 are missing.

Quote:
Identification cards found on as many as 15 percent of the victims link them to Kurdish villages in northern Iraq. The clothing reinforces that those found in the graves were Kurds, Nivala said.

Investigators said that at least 63 percent of the victims were children or teens under 18.

Hussein and Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as ''Chemical Ali," are the main defendants facing charges for the Anfal campaign.

Joo, if you want to play the humanitain justification for your war, then you should know that it is only justified when the atrocities are ongoing. Coming in 15 years after the fact is just another one of your weak justifications. And all those atrocities took place when Iraq was in the good books with the U.S.

Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee

Joined: 25 May 2003

Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 11:35 pm Post subject:

Quote:

No I was making the point that anyone who says they oppose the war on humanitarian grounds is either disingenuous or ignorant.

that or something like that is what Saddam does if he goes free. That is what his sons do if they go free.

So Saddam had to be contained? Right or wrong?

And only the US (and England ) were doing it

But containment was too costly for the US and the mid east as it is became a huge strategic problem for the US.

So the US went into Iraq to change the strategic situation in the mideast and get military bases in Iraq so the US could force mid east regimes to crack down on Al Qaida and stop teaching hate and inciting violence. Remember mideast states are all police states they can control what happens in their countries.

FUBAR

Joined: 21 Oct 2003
Location: The Y.C.

Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 11:37 pm Post subject:

Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote:

Mass grave is uncovered in Iraq Victims believed to be 1,500 Kurds
By Associated Press | May 1, 2005

Quote:

Maybe the US should have used this as a justification before the war. For them to use the discovery of the dead now as a reason for their invasion shows us how really backwards the Bush regime was. Only when WMD could not be found did they really start grasping for other reasons to justify this attack.

You know you're wrong. Bush knows he's wrong. Rice now's she wrong. Just once I would like to hear somebody from that office take responsibility for their actions.

Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee

Joined: 25 May 2003

Posted: Tue May 17, 2005 12:49 am Post subject:

FUBAR wrote:

Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote:

Mass grave is uncovered in Iraq Victims believed to be 1,500 Kurds
By Associated Press | May 1, 2005

Quote:

The WMD was the most easy way to sell the war, the US thought Saddam had WMDs but it doesn't make sense to give a nation 6 months notice.

Can't answer your question cause the results aren't in yet. There is one thing I am sure of that the mid east the way it was was a threat to the US.

That is your answer.

supernick

Joined: 24 Jan 2003
Location: Seoul

Posted: Tue May 17, 2005 6:25 am Post subject:

Quote:

I can't speak for others, but i was opposed to the war because it was created by lies. Some of you may have fallen for those lies and still believe them though those reasons have proved to be false. If Han Blitz came back and confirmed that Iraq had such weapons, I be much in favour of disarming iraq by force. I have not heard one person on this board opposing this war simply on humanitarian grounds.

What happened 15 years ago was assisted directly by the U.S. government through loans, supplies and the lifting of iraq from the list of countries that sponsor terrorism. I guess it would also be OK for other countries to invade the UK or the U.S. for their past atrocities. It wasn't so long ago that the British liked to bomb the Kurds.

Gas, chemicals, bombs: Britain has used them all before in Iraq

Jonathan Glancey
Saturday April 19, 2003
The Guardian

No one, least of all the British, should be surprised at the state of anarchy in Iraq. We have been here before. We know the territory, its long and miasmic history, the all-but-impossible diplomatic balance to be struck between the cultures and ambitions of Arabs, Kurds, Shia and Sunni, of Assyrians, Turks, Americans, French, Russians and of our own desire to keep an economic and strategic presence there.
Laid waste, a chaotic post-invasion Iraq may now well be policed by old and new imperial masters promising liberty, democracy and unwanted exiled leaders, in return for oil, trade and submission. Only the last of these promises is certain. The peoples of Iraq, even those who have cheered passing troops, have every reason to mistrust foreign invaders. They have been lied to far too often, bombed and slaughtered promiscuously.

Iraq is the product of a lying empire. The British carved it duplicitously from ancient history, thwarted Arab hopes, Ottoman loss, the dunes of Mesopotamia and the mountains of Kurdistan at the end of the first world war. Unsurprisingly, anarchy and insurrection were there from the start.

The British responded with gas attacks by the army in the south, bombing by the fledgling RAF in both north and south. When Iraqi tribes stood up for themselves, we unleashed the flying dogs of war to "police" them. Terror bombing, night bombing, heavy bombers, delayed action bombs (particularly lethal against children) were all developed during raids on mud, stone and reed villages during Britain's League of Nations' mandate. The mandate ended in 1932; the semi-colonial monarchy in 1958. But during the period of direct British rule, Iraq proved a useful testing ground for newly forged weapons of both limited and mass destruction, as well as new techniques for controlling imperial outposts and vassal states.

The RAF was first ordered to Iraq to quell Arab and Kurdish and Arab uprisings, to protect recently discovered oil reserves, to guard Jewish settlers in Palestine and to keep Turkey at bay. Some mission, yet it had already proved itself an effective imperial police force in both Afghanistan and Somaliland (today's Somalia) in 1919-20. British and US forces have been back regularly to bomb these hubs of recalcitrance ever since.

Winston Churchill, secretary of state for war and air, estimated that without the RAF, somewhere between 25,000 British and 80,000 Indian troops would be needed to control Iraq. Reliance on the airforce promised to cut these numbers to just 4,000 and 10,000. Churchill's confidence was soon repaid.

An uprising of more than 100,000 armed tribesmen against the British occupation swept through Iraq in the summer of 1920. In went the RAF. It flew missions totalling 4,008 hours, dropped 97 tons of bombs and fired 183,861 rounds for the loss of nine men killed, seven wounded and 11 aircraft destroyed behind rebel lines. The rebellion was thwarted, with nearly 9,000 Iraqis killed. Even so, concern was expressed in Westminster: the operation had cost more than the entire British-funded Arab rising against the Ottoman Empire in 1917-18.

The RAF was vindicated as British military expenditure in Iraq fell from £23m in 1921 to less than £4m five years later. This was despite the fact that the number of bombing raids increased after 1923 when Squadron Leader Arthur Harris - the future hammer of Hamburg and Dresden, whose statue stands in Fleet Street in London today - took command of 45 Squadron. Adding bomb-racks to Vickers Vernon troop car riers, Harris more or less invented the heavy bomber as well as night "terror" raids. Harris did not use gas himself - though the RAF had employed mustard gas against Bolshevik troops in 1919, while the army had gassed Iraqi rebels in 1920 "with excellent moral effect".

Churchill was particularly keen on chemical weapons, suggesting they be used "against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment". He dismissed objections as "unreasonable". "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes _ [to] spread a lively terror _" In today's terms, "the Arab" needed to be shocked and awed. A good gassing might well do the job.

Conventional raids, however, proved to be an effective deterrent. They brought Sheikh Mahmoud, the most persistent of Kurdish rebels, to heel, at little cost. Writing in 1921, Wing Commander J A Chamier suggested that the best way to demoralise local people was to concentrate bombing on the "most inaccessible village of the most prominent tribe which it is desired to punish. All available aircraft must be collected the attack with bombs and machine guns must be relentless and unremitting and carried on continuously by day and night, on houses, inhabitants, crops and cattle."

"The Arab and Kurd now know", reported Squadron Leader Harris after several such raids, "what real bombing means within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out, and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured, by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape."

In his memoir of the crushing of the 1920 Iraqi uprising, Lieutenant-General Sir Aylmer L Haldane, quotes his own orders for the punishment of any Iraqi found in possession of weapons "with the utmost severity": "The village where he resides will be destroyed _ pressure will be brought on the inhabitants by cutting off water power the area being cleared of the necessaries of life". He added the warning: "Burning a village properly takes a long time, an hour or more according to size".

Punitive British bombing continued throughout the 1920s. An eyewitness account by Saleh 'Umar al Jabrim describes a raid in February 1923 on a village in southern Iraq, where bedouin were celebrating 12 weddings. After a visit from the RAF, a woman, two boys, a girl and four camels were left dead. There were many wounded. Perhaps to please his British interrogators, Saleh declared: "These casualties are from God and no one is to be blamed."

One RAF officer, Air Commodore Lionel Charlton, resigned in 1924 when he visited a hospital after such a raid and faced armless and legless civilian victims. Others held less generous views of those under their control. "Woe betide any native [working for the RAF] who was caught in the act of thieving any article of clothing that may be hanging out to dry", wrote Aircraftsman 2nd class, H Howe, based at RAF Hunaidi, Baghdad. "It was the practice to take the offending native into the squadron gymnasium. Here he would be placed in the boxing ring, used as a punch bag by members of the boxing team, and after he had received severe punishment, and was in a very sorry condition, he would be expelled for good, minus his job."

At the time of the Arab revolt in Palestine in the late 1930s, Air Commodore Harris, as he then was, declared that "the only thing the Arab understands is the heavy hand, and sooner or later it will have to be applied". As in 1921, so in 2003.

Apple Scruff

Joined: 29 Oct 2003

Posted: Tue May 17, 2005 9:35 am Post subject:

Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote:

So the US went into Iraq to change the strategic situation in the mideast and get military bases in Iraq so the US could force mid east regimes to crack down on Al Qaida and stop teaching hate and inciting violence. Remember mideast states are all police states they can control what happens in their countries.

I refer you back to:

Wangja wrote:

The lesson from all of this: the US government is just making this shit up as it goes along in a sorry attempt to cover up its mind-boggling stupidity.

Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee

Joined: 25 May 2003

Posted: Tue May 17, 2005 2:25 pm Post subject:

Quote:

The US did help Saddams' government though not as much as France or Russia or Germany did.

But the US support Saddam against another mass killer the Ayatollah Khonmeni.

[

Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee

Joined: 25 May 2003

Posted: Tue May 17, 2005 2:32 pm Post subject:

Quote:

Saudi Arabia real reason for invasion: analyst

April 3, 2004 - 3:10PM

Forget Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The real reason the United States invaded Iraq was Saudi Arabia, according to a US intelligence analyst.

Dr George Friedman, chairman of the United States private sector intelligence company Stratfor, said the US had settled on WMD as a simple justification for the war and one which it expected the public would readily accept.

Dr Friedman, in Australia on a business trip, said the US administration never wanted to explain the complex reasons for invading Iraq, keeping them from both the public and their closest supporters.

"That, primarily, was the fact that Saudi Arabia was facilitating the transfer of funds to al-Qaeda, was refusing to cooperate with the US and believed in its heart of hearts that the US would never take any action against them," he said.

Dr Friedman said the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the US prompted the strategy to hunt down al-Qaeda wherever it was to be found. But that proved exceedingly difficult.

"The US was desperate. There were no good policy choices," he said.

"Then the US turned to the question: we can't find al-Qaeda so how can we stop the enablers of al-Qaeda."

He said those enablers, the financiers and recruiters, existed in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

But the Saudi government variously took the view that this wasn't true or that they lacked the ability and strength to act, he said.

Dr Friedman said in March last year, the Saudis responded to US pressure by asking the US to remove all its forces and bases from their territory. To their immense surprise, the US did just that, relocating to Qatar.

He said Saudi Arabia and al-Qaeda shared a number of beliefs including that the US could not fight and win a war in the region and was casualty averse. There was a need to change that perception.

But close by was Iraq, the most strategically located nation in the Middle East, bordering Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Turkey and Iran.

"If we held Iraq we felt first there would be dramatic changes of behaviour from the Saudis," he said. "We could also manipulate the Iranians into a change of policy and finally also lean on the Syrians.

"It wasn't a great policy. It happened to be the only policy available."

Dr Friedman said US President George W Bush faced the difficulty of explaining this policy, particularly to the Saudis. Moves to link Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda failed completely.

"They then fell on WMD for two reasons," he said.

"Nobody could object to WMD and it was the one thing that every intelligence agency knew was true.

"We knew we were going to find them. And we would never have to reveal the real reasons.

"The massive intelligence failure was that everybody including Saddam thought he had WMD. He behaved as if he had WMD. He was conned by his own people."

AAP

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/04/03/1080941715525.html

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