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Politics : DON'T START THE WAR -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Art Bechhoefer who wrote (12079)	2/23/2003 4:19:54 PM
From: HG	Respond to of 25898

I have lived in the region for 9 years. I was there between between 87-95 when the Gulf War happened, lived thru the crisis. I worked for the newspaper called 'Gulf News' for a while, not as a journalist though. This war will be over quickly.....IMO. But that depends on how you define war i guess. People here say that Afghan war 'was' a resounding success...and so it seemed back then but I think it is far from over.... The undercurrents will last forever. The suicide bombings will increase. Terrorism will increase all over the world. There will be resistance to the American 'rule' in Iraq and middle east. It may end up being a Vietnam, or another Afghanistan at least.... But...the 'war' (if the goals of this war are just defeating them in warfare, getting Saddam out and disarming Iraq) will be over soon. The Iraqi army is not supportive of Saddam at all. They will surrender en masse - just like the last time if not faster.

To: Art Bechhoefer who wrote (12079)	2/23/2003 4:38:52 PM
From: PartyTime	Respond to of 25898

The subtitle to the below article could get catchy as more and more folks realize what's been happening. >>>Powell speaks with forked tongue Language, not truth, has been the first casualty of the West's war against terrorism Terry Jones Sunday February 23, 2003 The Observer It was interesting to hear Colin Powell accuse France and Germany of cowardice in not wanting to go to war. Or, as he put more succinctly, France and Germany 'are afraid of upholding their responsibility to impose the will of the international community'. Powell's speech brings up one of the most outrageous but least examined aspects of this whole war on Iraq business. I am speaking about the appalling collateral damage already being inflicted on the English language. Perhaps the worst impact is on our vocabulary. 'Cowardice', according to Colin Powell, is the refusal to injure thousands of innocent civilians living in Baghdad in order to promote US oil interests in the Middle East. The corollary is that 'bravery' must be the ability to order the deaths of 100,000 Iraqis without wincing or bringing up your Caesar salad. I suppose Tony Blair is 'brave' because he is willing to expose the people who voted for him to the threat of terrorist reprisals in return for getting a red carpet whenever he visits the White House, while Chirac is a 'coward' for standing up to the bigoted bullying of the extremist right-wing Republican warmongers who currently run the United States. In the same vein, well-fed young men sitting in millions of dollars' worth of military hardware and dropping bombs from 30,000ft on impoverished people who have already had all their arms taken away are exemplars of 'bravery'. 'Cowardliness', according to George W. Bush, is hijacking an aircraft and deliberately piloting it into a large building. There are plenty of things you could call that, but not 'cowardly'. Yet when Bill Maher pointed this out on his TV show, Politically Incorrect, he was anathematised and the sponsors threatened to withdraw funding from the show. Something weird is going on when not only do the politicians deliberately change the meanings of words, but also society is outraged when someone points out the correct usage. Then there's 'the international community'. Clearly, Colin Powell cannot be talking of the millions who took to the streets last Saturday. The 'international community' he's talking about must be those politicians who get together behind closed doors to decide how best to stay in power and enrich their supporters by maiming, mutilating and killing a lot of foreigners in funny clothes whom they'll never see. And while we're at it, what about that word 'war'. My dictionary defines a 'war' as 'open, armed conflict between two parties, nations or states'. Dropping bombs from a safe height on an already hard-pressed people, whose infrastructure is in chaos from years of sanctions and who live under an oppressive regime, isn't a 'war'. It's a turkey shoot. But then the violence being done to the English language is probably the price we have to pay for cheap petrol. Language is supposed to make ideas clearer so that we can understand them. But when politicians such as Colin Powell, George W. Bush, and Tony Blair get hold of language, their aim is usually the opposite. That's how they persuade us to take ludicrous concepts seriously. Like the whole idea of a 'war on terrorism'. You can wage war against another country, or on a national group within your own country, but you can't wage war on an abstract noun. How do you know when you've won? When you've got it removed from the Oxford English Dictionary? When men in power propose doing something that is shameful, wrong and destructive, the first casualty is the English language. It would matter less if it were the only casualty. But if they carry on perverting our vocabulary and twisting our grammar, the result will spell death for many who are now alive.<<< observer.co.uk

To: Art Bechhoefer who wrote (12079)	2/23/2003 4:49:06 PM
From: PartyTime	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25898

Top Bush aide savages 'selfish' Chirac White House adviser Richard Perle tells David Rose that France's 'cosy relationship' with Saddam means it will veto a second UN resolution Sunday February 23, 2003 The Observer A leading adviser to President Bush last night launched a savage attack on President Chirac's diplomatic campaign to block war with Iraq, saying that it was merely the product of French commercial interests masquerading as a moral case for peace. In an exclusive interview with The Observer, Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board and a central figure in the circle of hawks around Bush, went well beyond US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's recent criticism of 'old Europe', warning that war without the further approval of the UN Security Council was now imminent. 'I'm rather pessimistic that we will get French support for a second resolution authorising war,' Perle said. 'I think they will exercise their veto, and in other ways obstruct unified action by the Security Council: they're lobbying furiously now.' Perle agreed that support for war in Britain and America would rise if there were a second resolution, and that the UN was 'a symbol of international legitimacy'. But in words that will serve only to deepen the transatlantic rift over Iraq, he added: 'These five countries, the permanent members of the Security Council, are not a judicial body. They're not expected to make moral or legal judgments, but to advance the respective interests of their countries. 'So if the French ambassador gets up and expresses the position of the government of France, what you are hearing is the moral authority of Jacques Chirac, whatever that may mean. 'What you're hearing is what the French President perceives to be in the interests of France. And the French President has found his own way of dealing with Saddam Hussein. It would be counter to French interests to destroy that cosy relationship, and replace it with a hostile one. 'So how much legitimacy attaches to a French veto? At some point, people are going to have to start asking themselves that question.' In Perle's view, the French position against regime change in Iraq is fatally undermined by its multi-billion-dollar oil interests negotiated since the last Gulf war: 'There's certainly a large French commercial interest in Iraq, and there are contracts that a new government in Iraq may not choose to uphold, partly because they're so unfavourable to the people of Iraq. Saddam has been prepared to do deals to keep himself in power at the expense of the people. 'My understanding of the largest of these deals, which is the French Total-Fina-Elf contract to develop certain oil properties in Iraq, is that it is both very large and very unfavourable to the Iraqis.' Perle added that he found the claim that America wished to topple Saddam for the sake of its own oil interests bizarre. 'The US interest is to buy oil cheaply on the world market. And the best way to increase the supply of Iraqi oil, and so cut prices, would have been to abandon sanctions in 1991 and urge the expansion of Iraqi exploration and development. 'When you consider that there is now a prospect that the oilfields may be destroyed by Saddam, if what we really wanted was more oil, not only should we not be supporting Saddam's removal, we should be working with him.' Perle denied claims widely reported on both sides of the Atlantic that the Bush administration intends to rule Iraq directly through a military governor for an extended period, and that it envisages no role for the Iraqi opposition. He was scathing about the 'conventional wisdom' among the foreign policy and intelligence establishment, which holds that the Iraqi opposition groups are hopelessly divided and the country far too fractious for meaningful democracy. 'This is a trivial observation and a misleading one, both by CIA officials and MI6,' Perle said. 'They're simply wrong about this. They don't understand the opposition. They say they're divided. Are they more divided than the Labour Party? I rather doubt it. Are they more divided than the Tories? I certainly doubt that.' His own long-term dealings with Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, and key figures in the main Kurdish groups, had convinced him and other leading US policymakers that 'Iraq is a very good candidate for democratic reform'. 'It won't be Westminster overnight, but the great democracies of the world didn't achieve the full, rich structure of democratic governance overnight. The Iraqis have a decent chance of succeeding under the leadership that has developed in the diaspora caused by Saddam's seizure of power.' Reports claiming that a US military governor would keep most of Saddam's Baath Party officials in place and run the country on existing administrative structures were inaccurate and absurd, Perle said. 'The idea that the US would simply issue orders to the same mob that served under Saddam is ridiculous. This is not simply about switching one mafia family for another. American policy after Saddam's removal will be to assist the Iraqis to move as quickly as physically and practically possible into positions of power.' As Assistant Defence Secretary under President Ronald Reagan, Perle was one of the key architects of the 1980s aggressive policy towards the Soviet Union, which Reagan dubbed an 'evil empire' and did much to undermine. He said he found it dismaying that many in Europe now found it 'politically incorrect' to describe regimes such as Iraq and North Korea as evil now: 'What we discovered from the victims of the Soviet empire, once they were free to speak, was that they agreed with us: evil was exactly the word they chose. I suspect that's the word that would be chosen by most of those forced to live in North Korea under Kim Jong Il, under the Iranian mullahs and Saddam Hussein.' observer.co.uk