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

To: Bilow who wrote (122994)	1/10/2004 6:55:42 PM
From: Sig	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I read thru most of the discussions you posted about France. Difficult to relate those to Iraq at this moment. Saddam was the murderer and torturer in his own country, as the French acted against the French(?) in Algeria. A difference is that France tried to hold its (self-determined) empire together by force,against the wishes of Algerians. Iraq is not a part of the US empire, we want to leave as soon as possible and give the Iraqis a chance to run their own country, which is something never offered to the Algerians. So what is the purpose of an organized resistance in Iraq, since we are leaving anyway.? IMO it would be a ego trip by Saddam supporters who seek credit for driving the infidels ( thats us) out of the country. It will not work, but whenever we do decide to leave, someone will step forward and try to take credit for driving us out. That wont happen either, since I believe we will leave quietly and gradually -no big deal. Since the majority of Iraqis want us to hang around until they are better organized, their new police and military are going to give the revolutionaries a hard time- leaving them with no time to get organized or heavily armed. But things could get much more interesting when the new Iraqi government takes over, and our forces recede into the background a bit. It will be Iraqi vs dissident Iraqi, and if Saddam supporters get fiesty, we have a few Tomahawks left over. Lots of options open here, if thing get tougher. The Kurds would be proud to exert some influence on Saddam supporters to behave, the Japanese and S Koreans are moving in to support the Spanish, Aussie, US,and UK forces. So the dissidents will be taking on a big load in addition to the US, and they are already in the dog house with the UN and the RC. Sig

To: Bilow who wrote (122994)	1/12/2004 12:39:03 AM
From: bacchus_ii	Respond to of 281500

Great post again Bilow. I've brought a couple of time to your attention that USA had very ugly behavior on the war crime and atrocity in the pass. This post show that the "dark" side has also been the case for the French also among other country. I think it's in every human being as well as in any races, religions, country... It's lake of vigilance that bring it in power... Thanks for so many good posts from you…

To: Bilow who wrote (122994)	1/12/2004 9:23:03 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Where's the outrage? ________________ By Ruth Rosen Columnist Monday, January 12, 2004 San Francisco Chronicle sfgate.com THE RESPECTED and nonpartisan Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington released on Jan. 8 a long-awaited study whose major conclusion is that the Bush administration "systematically misrepresented" the threat from Iraq's weapons programs. Three leading nonproliferation experts -- Jessica T. Mathews, Joseph Cirincione and George Perkovich -- authored the study, which is based on comparisons of declassified U.S intelligence documents with U.N. weapons inspections reports and Bush administration statements. Although the authors agree that Iraq's weapons programs potentially constituted a long-term threat, they argue that they did not "pose an immediate threat to the United States, to the region or to global security." The U.N. inspections, they also conclude, worked far better than realized and proved to be more reliable than American intelligence. The Carnegie report says that Bush administration officials misrepresented Iraq's threat in three specific ways. First, they lumped together the threat posed by nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, even though there was no serious evidence of nuclear weapons. Second, they told the American public that Saddam Hussein would give WMD to terrorists, for which there was no evidence. Third, administration officials omitted "caveats, probabilities and expressions of uncertainty present in intelligence assessments" from their public statements. In other words, officials used a "worse case" scenario that was not based on actual intelligence. In early 2002, according to the Carnegie report, the U.S. intelligence community possessed an accurate assessment of Iraq's weapons programs. Soon afterward, a "dramatic shift" occurred as "the intelligence community began to be unduly influenced by policy-makers' views." This change coincided with the creation of a separate intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, in the Pentagon. The Carnegie report -- a serious indictment of the Bush administration's credibility -- instantly became the lead story on the British Broadcasting Corporation report and front-page news in newspapers around the world. Not so in the United States. On the same day, at a State Department news conference, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell conceded that he had no "smoking gun, concrete evidence" that Saddam Hussein ever had any ties to al Qaeda, the terrorist network responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Powell's admission contradicts Vice President Dick Cheney's frequent statements that have sought to link Hussein with al Qaeda terrorists. Also last week, the Bush administration quietly withdrew a military team whose 400 members have scoured Iraq for the biological and chemical weapons cited by the White House as the immediate reason for going to war last March. This group is part of the larger Iraq Survey Team, whose 1,400 members have spent the last seven months (and hundreds of millions of dollars) trying -- but failing -- to uncover any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. To many military observers, the withdrawal of this team reflects the administration's tacit acknowledgment that no WMD are likely to be found. So now we know that the U.S. government misled Congress and the American public. What will it take for the American people to realize they've been betrayed? Have we grown so jaded that we no longer expect the truth from our country's leaders? War is a serious matter, perhaps the most consequential decision ever made by elected leaders. Yet the Bush administration manipulated intelligence and then sent tens of thousands of young people off to war for reasons that have yet to be revealed. As a result, hundreds of soldiers have died and thousands more have been injured, and for what purpose? Some will greet all this news with a yawn. "Haven't we heard all this before?" they will ask. "We know there weren't any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We know there never was an imminent threat. So get over it." But I won't. And neither should you. E-mail Ruth Rosen at rrosen@sfchronicle.com. ©2004 San Francisco Chronicle