Iraq: Will they admit they were wrong?

[King Tech Quadafi]

http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Coren_Michael/2005/09/03/1200397.html

By MICHAEL COREN

In a naive way, I thought the situation in Iraq may have improved when I returned from a brief vacation.

It has gotten worse. An invasion based on false assumptions and a misleading premise has become the rape of a nation and the destruction of an ancient culture. The time will come when we will look back on all this as a stain on our history and an international disgrace.

This is no war and never was such. It was always planned to be a painless victory, a fight with no enemy worth the name. It now rots away like some decaying corpse of the body politic.

Even out of enlightened self-interest it is a disaster. The U.S. Republicans have lost massive amounts of support because of Iraq. The Iraq debacle has also partly legitimized the arguments of every member of the monotonous left, every Israel hater, every basher of the United States. At the very least, it has become a digression from important issues facing the world.

In terms of simple justice, it is undeniably wrong. Saddam Hussein's torture gangs may have been eliminated and his prisons emptied, but now tens of thousands on all sides of the conflict have died and are dying. The Iraqi middle classes, the intelligentsia so crucial to a stable society, are hemorrhaging.

They are joined by Iraq's Christians, who are generally worse off today than they were under the monster Saddam.

Women are terrified of losing the basic civil rights that, ironically, they enjoyed under the secular regime that existed before the invasion. It's important to remember that Saddam was a modern dictator, not some Islamic fundamentalist.

But then Saudi Arabia, genuinely fundamentalist, is a friend of the West and Iran is too powerful to play the obliging victim.

Civil war is likely and the chances of some form of Islamic state disturbingly high. Imagine the scenario: Iran allied to a large chunk of Iraq, with the various minorities gone or oppressed and a besieged Kurdish nation fighting for its life.

The notion that the U.S. is economically, emotionally and politically capable of maintaining an enormous military presence in Iraq is pure fantasy.

At home, the price of oil and gas has skyrocketed, meaning that the same ordinary guys who have to send their children off to a pointless war are also being exploited when they fill up their cars, which they have to buy because the inner cities are no longer livable but the jobs are there and the homes are in the suburbs.

The monumental amount of money spent on the rape of Iraq could transform domestic policy and improve the lives of legions of Americans. Instead it makes arms manufacturers even more obscenely wealthy.

An entire generation of young people in the Middle East, and their brothers and sisters in the Muslim diaspora, have been radicalized and made militant by one of the most foolish and costly examples of geopolitics in modern history.

Yet still the war is rationalized and defended by people who cannot admit that they were wrong. There is no progress, no freedom and, it seems, no hope.

Nor is this in any way like the liberation of Germany in 1945, as the war's supporters so often tell us. Germany had known democracy before the Nazis, the country was exhausted and wanted peace and there was consensus on what had to be done.

Iraq's powerless, and the powerless of so many other countries affected by connected terror, suffer for the actions of a rash and thoughtless few. Pray it is not too late to do something about this stinking mess. Pray very hard indeed.

[King Tech Quadafi]

It has gotten worse. An invasion based on false assumptions and a misleading premise has become the rape of a nation and the destruction of an ancient culture. The time will come when we will look back on all this as a stain on our history and an international disgrace.

This is no war and never was such. It was always planned to be a painless victory, a fight with no enemy worth the name. It now rots away like some decaying corpse of the body politic.

Yet still the war is rationalized and defended by people who cannot admit that they were wrong. There is no progress, no freedom and, it seems, no hope.

juss a reminder.....

[J Bananas]

It's such an ugly situation that there is no one way out and if someone in pwer admitted they wrong flat out they would appear weak in the face of all their supporters, leading to more angry right wing pricks like CWalker and Trauma who just talk shit about leftists eveyr chance they get. You would see that begin to happen on a larger scale because the republicans would always have theur guard on. Shit would just fall apart in to civil unrest slowly. As for physically removing troops from Iraq what is in the works right now is the second phase of the American occupation where we are now breaking up our large platoons, and dispersing fewer and fewer soldiers into seperate platoons made up of Irqi soldiers we trained. This way We can start sending people home while we sill have some soldiers looking after The Iraqi troops until they get on their feet. Not like it was even our responsibility in the first place but at this point it's a step in the right direction.

[King Tech Quadafi]

^ unfortunately as much as we would all like to see your secenrio come true, the reality on the ground doesnt give us hope for optimism

U.S. the new Saddam

By ERIC MARGOLIS

The most important news from Iraq last week was not the much ballyhooed constitutional pact by Shias and Kurds, nor the tragic stampede deaths of nearly 1,000 pilgrims in Baghdad.

The U.S. Air Force's senior officer, Gen. John Jumper, stated U.S. warplanes would remain in Iraq to fight resistance forces and protect the American-installed regime "more or less indefinitely." Jumper's bombshell went largely unnoticed due to Hurricane Katrina.

Gen. Jumper let the cat out of the bag. While President George Bush hints at eventual troop withdrawals, the Pentagon is busy building four major, permanent air bases in Iraq that will require heavy infantry protection.

Jumper's revelation confirms what this column has long said: The Pentagon plans to copy Imperial Britain's method of ruling oil-rich Iraq. In the 1920s, the British cobbled together Iraq from three disparate Ottoman provinces to control newly-found oil fields in Kurdistan and along the Iranian border.

London installed a puppet king and built an army of sepoy (native) troops to keep order and put down minor uprisings. Government minister Winston Churchill authorized use of poisonous mustard gas against Kurdish tribesmen in Iraq and Pushtuns in Afghanistan (today's Taliban). The RAF crushed all revolts.

It seems this is what Jumper has in mind. Mobile U.S. ground intervention forces will remain at the four major "Fort Apache" bases guarding Iraq's major oil fields. These bases will be "ceded" to the U.S. by a compliant Iraqi regime. The U.S. Air Force will police the Pax Americana with its precision-guided munitions and armed drones.

The USAF has developed an extremely effective new technique of wide area control. Small numbers of strike aircraft are kept in the air around the clock. When U.S. ground forces come under attack or foes are sighted, these aircraft deliver precision-guided bombs. This tactic has led Iraqi resistance fighters to favour roadside bombs over ambushes against U.S. convoys.

The USAF uses the same combat air patrol tactic in Afghanistan, with even more success. The U.S. is also developing three major air bases in Pakistan, and others across Central Asia, to support its plans to dominate the region's oil and gas reserves.

While the USAF is settling into West Asia, the mess in Iraq continues to worsen. Last week's so-called "constitutional deal" was the long-predicted, U.S.-crafted pact between Shias and Kurds, essentially giving them Iraq's oil and virtual independence. The proposed constitution assures American big business access to Iraq's oil riches and markets.

The furious but powerless Sunnis were left in the lurch. Sunnis will at least have the chance to vote on it in a Oct. 15 referendum, but many fear it will be rigged.

The U.S. reportedly offered the 15 Sunni delegates $5 million each to vote for the constitution -- but was turned down. No mention was made that a U.S.-guided constitution for Iraq would violate the Geneva Conventions.

Chinese Taoists say you become what you hate. In a zesty irony, the U.S. now finds itself in a similar position as demonized Saddam Hussein. Saddam had to use his Sunni-dominated army to hold Iraq together by fighting Kurdish and Shia rebels. His brutal police jailed tens of thousands and routinely used torture.

Today, Iraq's new ruler, the U.S., is battling Sunni insurgents, ("al-Qaida terrorists," in the latest Pentagon doublespeak), rebuilding Saddam's dreaded secret police, holding 15,000 prisoners and torturing captives, as the Abu Ghraib outrage showed.

Much of the Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama National Guard were in Iraq last week week instead of at home. Meanwhile, the Kurds are de facto independent, the Shia are playing footsie with Iran, and large parts of Iraq resemble the storm-ravaged U.S. Gulf Coast -- or vice versa.

http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Margolis_Eric/2005/09/04/1201356.html

[J Bananas]

Chinese Taoists say you become what you hate.

haha, fuck if only it werent true.

[Compton Casanova]

this Iraq war is bull.