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- anticant
- London, United Kingdom
- anticant is the blogname of a lifelong free speech and civil rights campaigner. A lot of his life since WW2 has been taken up with battling against cruel and over-bossy laws, censorship, censoriousness, and Nanny Knows Best types. Now elderly and in poor health, anticant hopes his memories and thoughts will be of interest to those engaged in today's struggles for freedom, democracy, and a more hopeful tomorrow. e-mail: anticant@hotmail.co.uk
14 comments:
I'm afraid oil will be a fiasco, too.
Wrong principles cannot yield right ends.
I agree with you, Jose, but sadly history shows that all too often wrong principles and actions can bring at least temporary success to the perpetrators, and misery to others.
At the present time, I can see no 'good' outcomes in the Middle East.
Thank you guys, you have given me an idea concerning "principles" :
http://gatwickcity.phpbb3now.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=121
People tend to focus either on the "Hussein = evil" and alleged ties to Al Qaeda -- which moved in after the invasion, not before -- or else on the oil....
Why does everyone miss the other connection?
It is the same mix that we see in the Central Asian republics. There are vast deposits of oil and gas there; there is also a role being played by Islamic terrorists. But, that's not all.
Oil is a motivation only for some.
Motives are ultimately irrelevant. "The best laid schemes of mice and men...." What counts is outcomes. Whatever the motives, and the strategies declared and hidden, the outcome of the Iraq folly is going to be bad news for the USA and the West in general.
"Motives are ultimately irrelevant."
"Wrong principles cannot yield right ends."
If motives are ultimately irrelefant, then Jose is flat out wrong, and wrong principles can yield right ends.
Motives are at the very heart of the matter, because if you fail to understand the motives, you will be unable to prevent future crises.
You have to anticipate where these guys will strike next, which is Iran, because the heroin has to move from Afghanistan to Europe, and Iran has been a major route. Unfortunately, Iran has also been very effective at interdiction of the drug trade. Disrupt Iran with military strikes and instability, and the bumper crops of poppies, which are being converted to heroin in Afghanistan now, will get to market easier.
Fail to understand their motives, and you run in circles hand-wringing and stomping out political fires, while corrupt elements in the Bush Administration get richer and more powerful -- so much so that even a new Presidency may not disrupt their operations.
You have to understand the motivations so that, instead of stomping out fires, you can put the arsonists in jail.
Oil? Drugs? Sex slavery? Does it matter? The motivation for all of these, and any other pretext you care to name, is always the same - immoral greed for money, and for power without responsibility: the wages of the harlot down the ages.
Anon (Michael)
Yes of course the illegal invasion was totally about oil. It was about controlling the world's second largest oil reserves, it was about discouraging other nations not to follow Saddam's move to sell oil in a currency other than US$ and it was about constructing a oil pipeline down to Haifa in the Apartheid State.
The principle reason was without doubt the protection of the US$ as the world's reserve currency, and in that regard the USA has already lost, a fact we should all be thankful for.
It doesn't HAVE to be 'either/or'. Oil was obviously a prime motivating factor, but if you read Yankee Doodle's recent posts, he makes a powerful case for drug trafficking as another interest.
Anon (Michael)
Let's not beat around the bush, the invasion and occupation was and is 100% about oil. It certainly wasn't about WMD, we now know that there wasn't any, we now know that it wasn't a case of poor "intelligence" because the intelligence was deliberately misinterpreted, in fact totally reversed, to justify an illegal invasion.
It wasn't about Iraq's links with terrorism because there wasn't any. It wasn't about humanitarian concerns because many of the allegations against the Saddam regime were invented in Washington, I refer to 3 to 400,000 mass graves, building palaces instead of feeding people, even "human shredders".
The discussions regarding the planned illegal invasion included oil executives and plans on how to plunder the oil revenue.
Whatever the "motives" and I assure you that some are indeed pure, such as those of the troops- we can not leave and allow islamofascists to have a victory. They will descend on the freedom loving people and tear them to shreds- as is what happened when we pulled out of Vietnam- and the left, once again, will fail to protect them when they are screaming for help and rescue... only this time it will be worse
check out the following for some good info about Vietnam from someone who was there and knows what he is talking about:
http://www.ronaldwinterbooks.com/blog/
Islamists have already outlined their plans, and I dread their "perfect day scenario" (look it up) because I realize how possible and likely these things are should the enemy be given free reign by those who would trust them. Retreating would result in them seeing it as a Holy victory against us, and a sign that they are doing the right thing in fighting us. It would certainly up their ability to recruit the people they already brainwash.
Until we completely crush the insurgency-not an impossible endeavor, but certainly not something to expect to be done in a relatively short amount of time- we must not abandon our task.
Whatever the motives - and they were obviously mixed - it should never have happened because it was a monumental strategic blunder, and anyone with more adequate knowledge of Middle Eastern peoples than most Americans appear to have knew that before you went in.
Do remove the blinkers. 'Surges' and 'crushing the insurgency' is never going to work. It will merely drain the USA's already overstretched resources, and lead you more deeply into the mire.
You are between a rock and a hard place, and it is all the result of your own purblind folly.
Falcon, I agree with you and Yankee Doodle that the values of Islam and those of the West are incompatible. The question we face is what to do about this, now that American actions since 2001 have aroused much more widespread hostility towards the West throughout the Muslim world than previously existed.
According to CIA estimates, there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world - one in every four of the global population. If Muslims and non-Muslims cannot - or do not want to - live peaceably alongside one another, what is the West to do? Buy them off by paying 'danegeld' [the current American policy towards Saudi Arabia, which doesn't seem to be working very well]; nuke them [which I hope you will agree is unthinkable by any sane person]; fight a long-running - possibly never-ending - low-intensity guerilla war which will inevitably spread beyond its present theatres in Iraq and Afghanistan, and could quite soon reach the American homeland; or what?
Can you please suggest some reality-based - not Hollywood style! - scenarios? We are all anxious to know.
It's not Islam that is trying to dominate the world, it's the USA. If it wasn't for Islam sitting on a large proportion of the world's oil reserves the USA wouldn't have a problem with it.
It's not Islam that has caused the recent genocide in the Middle East, 1.5 million from 1991 caused by the UN Sanctions which the USA refused to release, followed by another 1.2 since the illegal invasion. It wasn't an Islamic that said the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children were "worth it", it was an American Jew called Albright. It wasn't Islam that caused at least 30 million deaths in the Soviet gulags , it was Jewish communists. It wasn't Islam that caused the holocaust or caused 100 million deaths in Europe by WW2. It's not Islam that has supported the Apartheid State an their wars of aggression in 1948,1956,1967, 1973,1982 and 2006.
The USA has a record of supporting and funding terrorism all over the world in the last 60 years
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