Gary >This concern for the Iraqi public has been lacking since 1991 along with the want of their oil. Tell me there isn't a connection.
I think we can see what is happening. The US administration is worried that the world (or many people in the world) is seeing them as "bad guys" when America is used to playing the role of the "good guy".
I think the piece which you posted at #17402 "The Madness of Empire --- The War Party’s militarized strategy will unite the world against us" pretty much sets out the difficulty facing the "War Party". A fundamental problem they have is that they have shown their "cards" to everyone
>>>A new war against Iraq was a gleam in the eye of a small but influential group long before 9/11. In 1998, the newly established Project for a New American Century (PNAC), an advocacy group chaired by Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, began sending open letters from prominent foreign policy hawks. First, it wrote to the Clinton administration calling upon the United States to “remove Saddam’s regime.” When its advice was ignored, PNAC asked Republican Congressional leaders to push for war. The signatories included Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz (now number two at the Pentagon), Elliott Abrams (recently appointed to the National Security Council as a director of Mid-East policy), William Bennett, John Bolton (now Undersecretary of State), and the ubiquitous Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board and often considered the central figure in the interlocking web of neoconservative think tanks.
PNAC’s ambitions go well beyond Saddam’s overthrow. Immediately after 9/11, the group began pushing to expand the war against other Muslim states, calling for the U.S. to target Hezbollah and its sponsors, Iran and Syria. PNAC also wants the U.S. to stop trying to foster a peace between Israel and the Palestinians, advocating withdrawal of the small amount of aid the U.S. gives the Palestinian Authority and granting full support to Israel’s right wing Likud government.
These tactical measures are elements within a broader vision of a more militarized U.S. foreign policy, carried out without allies if necessary. In the final year of the first Bush administration, Paul Wolfowitz penned a memo under the aegis of then Secretary of Defense Cheney, calling for the United States to ramp up its defense spending in order to deter any other country from “even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” China, Russia, Germany, and Japan were to be intimidated from seeking more power in their own regions. After the Wolfowitz draft was leaked to the press, it received widespread ridicule, and the Bush I diplomats rushed to reassure allies that Wolfowitz’s views did not truly reflect American foreign policy.<<<
It now becomes extremely hard to show that the US move towards war is not premeditated and part of an agenda. As you know, war is legitimate if carried out in self-defence against aggression but is a crime if undertaken as a plan to grab someone's country, or for whatever reason, even if that person is a tyrant.
The idea was to pin the war against Saddam on to 911 but, because there isn't any evidence, they can't get it to stick. So, they are trying other reasons --- WMD, but that's wearing thin, too. Then, regime change because Saddam is a bad guy etc etc but that doesn't stick. Now, they want to introduce American "democracy", but that's a joke. The Arabs don't want it and didn't ask for it.
>>>The American Enterprise Institute’s Joshua Muravchik has written a primer on “exporting democracy” whose phrases now pop up regularly in Bushite rhetoric.
The war for democracy is meant to bring about eternal peace. A television sound-bite of the neo-imperialists is “democracies don’t fight one another,” though the generalization seems to ignore the bloodiest war in the 19th century (America’s Civil War) and arguably the one that brought about the end of Europe’s global pre-eminence (World War I). <<<
Actually, I think this whole war thing has gotten "stuck in the mud". Nothing is going easily or smoothly and the US, in certain peoples' opinion, is beginning to look crazy for even wanting to go to war.
>>>Consider America’s international situation: a country rich and technologicially advanced, blessed with unusually stable political system, separated from hostile countries by huge oceans, and still retaining durable long term friendships with the world’s most powerful and successful democratic states, and requiring serious international police and intelligence cooperation to deal with its most pressing enemy, al-Qaeda. For such a nation suddenly to decide that its best and only option to “save itself” is to embark on a course of imperial expansion, one that will be opposed vigorously by the rest of the world, seems almost a form of madness. <<< |
