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

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (12615)	2/25/2003 3:05:45 AM
From: ajax99	Respond to of 25898

anyone have any working links to news on Human shields?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (12615)	2/25/2003 3:08:37 AM
From: HG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25898

Ray, Could we please be a little more civil in our discussions? crow has been a personal friend of mine for the last 4 years, and he's an extremely intelligent and sensitive person. I know opposing viewpoints get blood pressures soaring, but I think we can discuss matters without turning abusive ? At least with people who themelves are civil ?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (12615)	2/25/2003 3:26:13 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 25898

Mandela: "Stop the Holocaust" On the Brink of War By DAVID KRIEGER CounterPunch February 8, 2003 counterpunch.com We are on the brink of a war that will undoubtedly be disastrous for the people of Iraq, and likely even more so for the people of the United States. Listening to President Bush's rhetoric, one has the feeling that it is Hate Week in Orwell's 1984. Surely, Saddam Hussein is a dictator who has committed atrocities in the past. Surely, the American people can be aroused to hate Saddam. These are the buttons that are being pushed by Bush and his militant advisors who are eager for war. As Bush raises shrill charges against Hussein, US troops take up their positions on his orders surrounding Iraq. According to Bush, "Saddam has the motive and the means and the recklessness and the hatred to threaten the American people." But exactly what motive could he have? Self-destruction? The desire to see himself and his country destroyed? On the contrary, his motivation seems to be to hold off a war by allowing free access in his country to the United Nations weapons inspectors. But still Saddam is easy to hate, and the Bush administration is pressing for a war. "The United States," says Bush, "along with a growing coalition of nations, is resolved to take whatever action is necessary to defend ourselves and disarm the Iraqi regime." But how exactly is Saddam threatening us? What exactly are we defending against? These are among the questions that go unanswered by the administration and the media as Bush pushes for war. In fact, the Iraqi regime has been largely disarmed. It will be a fairly easy target for the US military with its crushing might, a far easier target of attack than North Korea. Sometimes in the flurry of administration invective, it is difficult to remember that it is the United States that has an arsenal of 10,000 nuclear weapons and Iraq that has none, or that it is the US military that is surrounding Iraq and that Iraq has not actually made any threat against the US. Neither the Bush administration nor the American media has paid much attention to the consequences of a US attack to "disarm" Saddam. They do so at their peril and at the peril of the American people because the consequences will be grave. The consequences will include the deaths of many innocent Iraqi civilians and young American troops. They will include increased hatred of the US throughout the Arab world, and a corresponding rise in terrorism. They will include the undermining of the international law of war and of the United Nations. The global economy could be sent into a tailspin, and there will potentially be serious adverse effects on the environment. This war will cause major rifts in the Western alliance. It will provide a precedent to other leaders who want to solve international conflicts by means of preemptive unilateral wars. It will encourage the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction in countries likely to be threatened by the US in the future. In the end, it will be the American people who will pay the heaviest price for Bush's ill-considered war. We will be the victims of future acts of terrorism and our civil liberties will continue to be diminished as power is concentrated in a dictatorial president. We should not lose track of the fact that George Bush was not elected. He was selected by a small group of conservative justices on the US Supreme Court. This makes it even more tragic that he is leading our country into a disastrous war. Nelson Mandela, one of the great moral leaders of our time, recently expressed his sense of the Bush administration's policies: "It is a tragedy what is happening, what Bush is doing in Iraq. What I am condemning is that one power, with a president who has no foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust." Only the American people can stop this war, and only if they act now in overwhelming numbers. ____________________________________________________ David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He can be contacted at dkrieger@napf.org.

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (12615)	2/25/2003 3:42:59 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 25898

The French paid dearly for imperial and military hubris. Listen up, U.S. A Tip on Iraq From Those Who Walked That Road By Robert Scheer Columnist The Los Angeles Times February 25, 2003 The alliances on "Survivor" have more stability and logic than those currently held by the United States. We need a weekly two-hour special to keep us in the know. Did we buy off Turkey yet? Hey, what's $15 billion for a mercenary in need? And is Syria, the sworn enemy of our enemy, Saddam Hussein, our new friend? Oh, and if Pakistan is the dictatorship that backed the Taliban, why are we covering our ears and humming the theme to "Friends" whenever anyone talks about its nukes and scary collaboration with North Korea? We suddenly like those U.S. flag-burners in Tehran -- possessors of a nuclear weapons program Hussein can only dream of -- so much that we have given their boys in the Northern Alliance the keys to Kabul, and now we might open the back door for them to take over Shiite southern Iraq. On the other hand, old ally Germany and new ally Russia have both been downgraded to a status below lap dog Bulgaria for daring to suggest that Emperor Bush is without clothes; while uppity China is getting a reprieve because, as our second-largest trading partner, it keeps Wal-Mart stocked with patriotic animatronic toys. If we weren't worried about burning the waffles, we'd probably have lobbed a few cruise missiles into antiwar Belgium by now. Nutty Pyongyang is receiving a mix of strained patience and physical restraints, while we apparently think another round of electroshock therapy is the cure for troubled Iraq. And while we like Iraq's Kurds and Shiites now, they'd best be advised to cash in before the next immunity challenge, when they could be on the short end of the stick of whatever malleable Iraqi general we handpick to run our new oil fields. Is all this shuffling of friends and foes just realpolitik, similar to how we ignore the mayhem of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an inconvenient sideshow? Like when President Reagan was cutting secret arms deals with Tehran's fundamentalists, even as he sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad in 1984 to reaffirm our support for Iraq after the U.N. documented its use of poison gas on Iranian troops? Despite this confusing picture then and now, thanks to our enlightened talk-show hosts we all know that there is one nation of pure evil, one nasty country threatening to undermine the world's security with its lies, double-dealing and stubborn defiance, one state that Earth would simply be better off without. We're talking, of course, about France. Brie eaters. Surly waiters. WWII collaborators. And now, cowardly traitors in the crusade against the New Hitler. This idiocy is based on a highly selective historical memory, including the fact that the U.S. refused to enter the war against Hitler until after France fell. It also keeps us from being able to listen to a nation that has already been down the road we are traveling. Imperialism has always been pitched at home as a win-win way to help the world's stricken peoples while helping oneself, and in Paris it was no different. France's colonial wars were waged under the rival banners of Catholicism and the French Revolution; the goal was to civilize the natives. A million Frenchmen gave up the joys of life at the center of Europe to colonize Algeria alone, building schools, churches, hospitals and civic bureaucracies. Ultimately, however, the price of France's hubris was writ large in the blood of its sons and daughters over painful decades, from the fall of Dien Bien Phu to the Battle of Algiers, from the student protests of '68 to the bombs that terrorized Paris. One of the fallen was a French soldier-cum-journalist named Bernard Fall. He died when he stepped on a Viet Cong land mine while accompanying a U.S. patrol, but not before he had written compellingly about the inevitable stench of imperial ambition turning rancid. But let's let Colin Powell explain. "I recently read Bernard Fall's book on Vietnam, 'Street Without Joy,' " the secretary of State and Vietnam vet wrote in his 1995 autobiography. "Fall makes painfully clear that we had almost no understanding of what we had gotten ourselves into. I cannot help thinking that if President Kennedy or President Johnson had spent a quiet weekend at Camp David reading that perceptive book, they would have returned to the White House Monday morning and immediately started to figure out a way to extricate us from the quicksand of Vietnam." Many believe that the U.S. is simply incapable of imperialism or even of being wrong, that we are the divinely designated agent of democracy, that gleaming City on the Hill so frequently mentioned by Reagan. But the lesson of France is that merely riding in under the banner of liberty is no guarantee that you or those you "liberate" won't regret you ever left home. latimes.com