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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (168177)	4/21/2003 3:38:33 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574852

They are trying to control our actions a lot more then we are trying to control theirs. No, they are not......they did not agree with our position. And I think that's because they had a better sense of the principles in play here and the nature of the parties involved than we do. Yes they didn't agree with our position. And we didn't agree with thiers. I know its your opinion that they are right but many disagree. I don't think may disagreed with their position. I do know that many do disagree with our position. In any case whoever is right they where trying to control our actions more then we were trying to control theirs. This would be true even if they really did have a better sense of the facts and principles in play. What makes you think we were not controlling their actions? I am not convinced that Bush ever wanted to go along with the UN........that that was just a political ploy to placate certain people in this country. I think Bush very much manipulated the UN so that he could invade Iraq the way he wanted to. The whole UN thing was a farce from the get go. "We don't insist on UN approval every time France wants to throw its military around in Africa or elsewhere (genrally with less concern for innocent civilians and human rights then that displayed by American forces)." Huh? "Protests hit French intervention in Africa For three consecutive days angry crowds numbering as many as 10,000 people marched on the French embassy in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, to protest France's military intervention in its former African colony. French special forces troops swooped into the city on May 22 to put down a soldiers' mutiny against the corrupt regime of President Ange-Felix Patasse. Using helicopter gunships and armored vehicles, they killed dozens of soldiers and civilians who had joined the rebellion. " wsws.org; While I think this stinks, its not the same as what happened in Iraq. The Bagui gov't requested the assistance of the French. Why would that require UN intervention? "President Chirac himself warned years ago of 'rival Anglo-Saxons dreaming of pushing France out of Africa'. That attitude still holds in Paris. "The old economic staples of cocoa or minerals might not be there but oil is the biggest area of economic growth through western Africa and Paris does not want to lose out to the British in Nigeria or the Americans in Angola."" telegraph.co.uk. And you wonder why the Iraqis and the Arabs mistrust our involvement in Iraq. This says as much about us as it does the French. I am not sure what French action to which you are referring but I know for sure that any action they undertook is not comparable to the action we just took. The incident mentioned in my links is just one of a long series of interventions. The actions are smaller, but frequent and they include military action to decide who will rule a country. Of course Africa usually gets less attention then the Middle East, esp. when the intervention is smaller. The principle is the same whether the deployment is a few thousand or 300,000. If setting up or removing governments by force is wrong then its wrong either way. Also in the French interventions you usually have a lot less UN authorization then we had for Iraq. In the incidents you cite, there was no removal of gov'ts. Again, I think the French intervention stinks. I have never thought of the French as having high scruples. Nonetheless, I think its one thing to be invited by the gov't no matter how corrupt it is and another to invade a country with the intent to overthrow the gov't. Neither actions are desirable but the latter is definitely worse than the former. ted