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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (38655)	8/19/2002 2:14:39 PM
From: maceng2	Respond to of 281500

Did the Shah of Iran "morph" into the Ayatollah Komeini? Many would say that the regime under the Shah was worse then that under Komeini. He didn't fully realise the threat from Iraq though. 1953 Iran – CIA overthrows the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in a military coup, after he threatened to nationalize British oil. The CIA replaces him with a dictator, the Shah of Iran, whose secret police, SAVAK, is as brutal as the Gestapo. korpios.org from the same link The Gulf War — The U.S. liberates Kuwait from Iraq. But Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, is another creature of the CIA. With U.S. encouragement, Hussein invaded Iran in 1980. During this costly eight-year war, the CIA built up Hussein’s forces with sophisticated arms, intelligence, training and financial backing. This cemented Hussein’s power at home, allowing him to crush the many internal rebellions that erupted from time to time, sometimes with poison gas. It also gave him all the military might he needed to conduct further adventurism — in Kuwait, for example.

To: Ilaine who wrote (38655)	8/19/2002 7:13:35 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 281500

Your sanctimonious little capsule history doesn't pay a lot of attention to who, exactly, the mujahideen were. I imagine that's rather popular in neocon circles. Try this version of history out for size, given the warblogger dominance around here it's not terribly popular but nobody's actually disputed it either. At that time the Soviet Union was occupying Afghanistan, and the United States was supporting the Afghan resistance; Hekmatyar, though he was one of the most stridently anti-Western of the resistance leaders, was receiving roughly half the arms that the CIA was supplying. The sheikh had first met Hekmatyar in Saudi Arabia a number of years before, and they were friends. They had much in common: both were exceedingly charismatic religious populists; both had committed their lives to jihad, or Islamic holy war; both were fiery orators. They were both given to elliptical, colorful turns of phrase, and their shared message was clear: the imperative to overthrow a secular government -- whether in Afghanistan or Egypt -- and establish an Islamic state. . . . One of the groups that claimed credit for the bombing in Saudi Arabia -- and one that has warned that there will be further attacks -- had participated in the jihad in Afghanistan, as had all three of the groups believed to have been involved in the November bombing in Islamabad. The sheikh and the CIA (and Saudi Arabia) had been obsessed with driving out the Soviets. As a result the CIA helped to train and fund what eventually became an international network of highly disciplined and effective Islamic militants -- and a new breed of terrorist as well. . . . SIXTEEN years have passed since the CIA began providing weapons and funds -- eventually totaling more than $3 billion -- to a fratricidal alliance of seven Afghan resistance groups, none of whose leaders are by nature democratic, and all of which are fundamentalist in religion to some extent, autocratic in politics, and venomously anti-American. Washington's financial commitment to the jihad was exceeded only by Saudi Arabia's. At the time the jihad was getting under way there was no significant Islamist opposition movement in Saudi Arabia, and it apparently never occurred to the Saudi rulers, who feared the Soviets as much as Washington did, that the volunteers it sent might be converted by the jihad's ideology. Therein lies the greatest paradox of the bombing in Riyadh: it and the explosions in Peshawar and Islamabad could well prove to be part of the negative fallout -- or "blowback," in intelligence parlance -- of the U.S.- and Saudi-orchestrated Afghan jihad. . . . Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan had all served U.S. interests during the jihad Afghanistan; none appears able to cope with its aftermath. Mubarak's anger was palpable when he told me, months before the bombings, that he laid the blame for Islamist terrorism squarely on Pakistan, for, in his words, failing to "clean up" Peshawar and its environs. Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's bewilderment after the bombings was evident, as she once again faulted the United States and the CIA, which she accused of continuing to finance Pakistan's radical Muslim clerics and fundamentalist groups. As for the rulers of Saudi Arabia, whose princes and foundations, ironically, remain the leading benefactors of many of the militant Islamic groups in a shortsighted attempt to placate the kingdom's expanding fundamentalist constituency, they seemed shaken out of their placidity. And government officials in all three capitals began to wonder, as they redoubled their efforts against terrorism, whether the Islamists could still be contained. theatlantic.com The history in that story is admittedly a little inconvenient, but it seems about a thousand times more honest than your off-the-cuff 13 points. You can ignore whoever you want, you can post or not, you can claim people who agree with your former views on war, of a couple weeks or months ago, as opposed to your current views, are childish and petulent or whatever. if you fall by the wayside there's plenty of other warheads to pick up the slack here. When pressed on the apparently flaws and inconsistency in their grand plans for war and occupation in the Mideast, their response is about as edifying as your 13 points, and about as consistent with past and present events. The war's already started, I hear, at least according to Debka and the local warheads.