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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: NOW who wrote (17703)	4/21/2003 8:44:11 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Yes, Operation Ajax, widely known to all. So inaccurately described by you. 'Good move that, overthrowing the first democratically elected leader." In March 1951 the Majles passed his oil nationalization act, and his power had grown so great that the Shah was virtually forced to appoint him premier. A continuing struggle for control of the Iranian government developed between Mosaddeq and the Shah. In August 1953, when the Shah attempted to dismiss the Premier, mobs of Mosaddegh followers took to the streets and forced the Shah to leave the country. When Mosaddegh lost, the elections were allegedly rigged..... In the 15th Majlis elections, because of the election rigging, Mossadegh did not get the chance to enter the Parliament.... Despite all the interference and frauds of the Shah during the 16th Majlis elections, the fake ballot boxes were announced expired, and the Royal Court minister was assassinated. In the second round of the elections, Mossadegh and a group of his companions were elected. It was this Parliament that approved the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry. A while later, the Majlis elected Mossadegh as the new Prime Minister. When Mossadegh became Premier in 1951..... Mossadegh was not democratically elected Premier as you claimed. He was appointed Premier by the Shaw (Iran's leader), who was later forced to flee, leaving Mossadegh in charge of the new government. This is but another among a litany of alleged misdeeds by the CIA & our government that has allowed folks like you to make victims of every enemy & ally of the USA. The Evil Imperialist nation with its' so called (albeit no history of) doctrine of world domination & policy of preemption is always is to be faulted........ when a Republican is in the White House. Regardless of the veracity of Operation Ajax & all other conspiracies blaming America first & foremost; The war on terrorism & illegal WMD's is no longer about preemption. JMO "At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded ." LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN "Facts are the enemy of truth." - Don Quixote - "Man of La Mancha" “He will have to learn, I know, that all people are not just- that all men and women are not true. Teach him that for every scoundrel there is a hero that for every enemy there is a friend. Let him learn early that the bullies are the easiest people to lick.” - Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

To: NOW who wrote (17703)	4/21/2003 9:05:25 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

School me tooearly, how does one blame this on the Bush Administration? THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Saddam's little helper telegraph.co.uk. It doesn't get much worse than this. George Galloway is Britain's most active and visible peace campaigner. The Labour MP for Glasgow Kelvin did not just oppose the recent campaign against Saddam Hussein; he lobbied equally aggressively against the first Gulf war, and – during the years in between – for an end to sanctions. Yesterday, The Daily Telegraph's correspondent in Baghdad, David Blair, unearthed papers detailing alleged payments from Saddam's intelligence service to Mr Galloway through a Jordanian intermediary. There is a word for taking money from enemy regimes: treason. What makes this allegation especially worrying, however, is that the documents suggest that the money has been coming out of Iraq's oil-for-food programme. In other words, the alleged payments did not come from some personal bank account of Saddam's, but out of the revenue intended to pay for food and medicines for Iraqi civilians: the very people whom Mr Galloway has been so fond of invoking. [cont'd...]

To: NOW who wrote (17703)	4/21/2003 9:46:29 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 89467

Have any ideas how this is Bush's or America's fault? Follow the Money By WILLIAM SAFIRE nytimes.com Why do you suppose France and Russia — nations that for years urged the lifting of sanctions on oil production of Saddam's Iraq — are now preventing an end to those U.N. sanctions on free Iraq? Answer: the Chirac-Putin bedfellowship wants to maintain control of the U.N.'s oil-for-food program, under which Iraq was permitted to sell oil and ostensibly use the proceeds to buy food and medicine for its people. (In reality, Saddam skimmed a huge bundle and socked it away in Swiss, French and Asian banks.) Iraqis now desperately need all that the country's oil production can buy. But Jacques Chirac cares little about reconstruction of basic services; he is more concerned about maintaining U.N. control — that is, French veto control — of Iraq's oil. "Sophisticated international blackmail" is what Senator Arlen Specter called it yesterday. Blackmail is the apt word: unless the U.S. and Britain turn over primary control of Iraq to the U.N. — none of this secondary "vital role" stuff — Chiracism threatens to hobble oil sales and prevent recovery. This extortion is greeted with hosannas by the thousand or more U.N. employees and contractors involved in the present oil-for-food setup, many beholden to France for their jobs. And so long as the U.N. bureaucracy handles the accounting, it is as if Arthur Andersen were back in business — no questions are asked about who profits from the sanctions management. My Kurdish friends, for example, who are entitled by U.N. resolution to 13 percent of the oil-for-food revenues, believe their four million people are owed billions in food and hospital supplies. I wonder: in what French banks is the money collected from past oil sales deposited? Is a competitive rate of interest being paid? Is that interest being siphoned off in "overhead" to pay other U.N. bills? Colin Powell apparently believes that Chirac's new fondness for sanctions could tie up Iraqi oil production with litigation for years. His advice to President Bush is to pay the ransom but nibble away at the sanctions with limited resolutions. I think we should confront the extortion scheme head on and let Chirac use his veto to isolate France further. What other money trails need to be followed? Few doubt that vast Iraqi assets have been secretly transferred out of the country for years, and especially in the prewar months. This is done through cut-outs, phony foundations, numbered accounts, intelligence proprietaries, leveraged currency speculation through proxies in unregulated hedge funds and a hundred other financial devices. Taken together, Saddam's huge haul is now terrorism's central bank account. This kind of money moves not in satchels but over wires. Needed to root it out is a financial Javert. Bush and Tony Blair should create a task force of the best computer sleuths at Treasury, the exchequer, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Fed, Interpol and the Bank of England to ferret out the hidden billions that belong to the Iraqi people. (Here is how Admiral Poindexter can find gainful employment.) Start with the 200,000 barrels a day of Kirkuk oil that Iraq smuggled to Syria, an illegal pipeline flow ignored by the U.N. but stopped recently by Secretary Rumsfeld. Then follow the money: We know that President Bashar Assad turned an ophthalmologist's blind eye to Saddam's use of the Syrian port of Tartus to import missile fuel components from China and night-vision goggles from Russia. In return, Saddam sold Syria oil at a bargain price — say, as little as $5 a barrel. That adds up to more than a billion bucks over a few years in Saddam's personal pocket, placed — where? Money recaptured from the Thief of Baghdad should be used to build new villages for those Arabs he transferred north in his campaign to ethnically cleanse Kirkuk of troublesome Kurds. That would allow a peaceful return of Kurds to their ancestral homes without displacing Arab or Turkmen families. And here's the way the government of New Iraq can save some of the money it now loses by Russia's eager participation in blackmail in the Security Council: Declare that the $10 billion owed by Iraq under Saddam to Russia for unused tanks and planes will be repaid on the day Vladimir Putin repays the debt incurred by Russia under the czars.