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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (47042)	10/13/2004 5:17:03 AM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50167

General Tommy Franks, the U.S. war commander in Iraq, is revealing the secret behind the fall of Iraq. The former general tricked the toppled Iraqi President Saddam Hussein into fatally bungling the defence of his country through a double agent called April Fool. Thus, while U.S. armored columns raced to Baghdad from southern Iraq, Saddam kept many of his best divisions to fight expected U.S. attacks from the north and west, which is not what happened. Inadequately defended, Baghdad fell and the regime collapsed. "Because of the sensitivity of the deception, only a few in the U.S. government were aware of it," Franks writes in his memoirs, American Soldier (Regan Books), which is about to be published. Franks says that April Fool was an American officer who was approached by an Iraqi intelligence operative working undercover as a diplomat. With Franks' knowledge, April Fool sold the Iraqi false "top secret" invasion plot. "The story line we sold them went as follows: the coalition was planning to build up only a portion of its ground force in Kuwait, while preparing a major airborne assault into northern Iraq," Franks says in his book. "This would then be reinforced by the 4th Infantry Division, which the Turkish government would permit - at the last possible minute - to pass through Turkey and steamroll its way south to Baghdad. "The purpose of April Fool's work was to create doubt among Iraq's leadership as to where, when and with what force the coalition would launch its attack. If the deception succeeded, Saddam would keep the better part of 13 divisions north of Baghdad to defend against the 4th Infantry until it was too late to use them to counter the main coalition attack coming out of Kuwait." The interrogations held after the war confirmed that "the Iraqis believed we would attack from either the north or the west, and that is a major, major success," Franks said last week. Another aspect of the war kept secret from the eyes of the public, Franks says, was the mass bombing of Republican Guard positions south of Baghdad for three consecutive nights through the sandstorm that bogged down the early phases of the conflict. aljazeera.com

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (47042)	10/13/2004 6:03:55 PM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Respond to of 50167

Free thinking---- A few words about Turkey's possible accession to the EU. On what grounds is European? Geography; I believe three percent of Turkey is in Europe, 97% in Asia the Greeks recognised it as a different continent with Asia Minor. Language & Race: Turks may be a mixture of many peoples but they aren't European by blood, ancestrally they go back to the highlands of Anatolia, Iran and Turan. The language of the Turks is alien to the European tongues since it descends from the heart of Asia... Religion: Europe is Christendom, Islamic population represent a civilisation border. Democracy, wealth and history (Ottomans never intermarried with European nobility and were always a distinct peoples, as opposed to say the Russian Tsar whose blood was only 1/128th Russian) makes Turkey alien to Europe. Turkey is at the heart of the Islamic world and rather than be the beggar at the doors of Europe should once again take up the role as one of the three leading powers of Islam (Ottoman Turkey, Safavid Iran and Moghul India). These three nations are born to lead the Islamic world into a new renaissance and the Turks have no reason to join the European club (aid is being curbed, immigration halted and trade barriers are already being dismantled through the WTO). For Europeans as well the prospect of their tiny continent being swamped by 70mn foreigners is a fate hardly deserved by any peoples. It should look to Slavic Europe as the next wave of expansion, Russia is more European than Turkey could ever be. Albania and Bosnia, save for their Muslim populations, are however European peoples because in every other count, save religion, they match the criteria. Europe is a civilisation, a continent, Christendom of the medieval ages is the European Union of the modern age and it should match the borders of Europe. Zachary Latif 21:01 latif.blogspot.com