Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: KyrosL who wrote (159022)	3/13/2005 10:47:39 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

Nadine, we all know that weapons sites under UN seal were thoroughly looted under the largely indifferent eyes of US troops No, we certainly don't know that! Those charges were flung about, leaked by Al Baradei, (by some odd coincidence, in the week before the election), but when you looked into them, in many cases it was not at all clear that the serious looting had happened after the Americans showed up. The demand that the Americans should have put everything under lock and key on the instant, or before they were in the area, was an unreasonable one, esp. in the context of what was still a shooting war. Though I'm sure there were mistakes and miscommunications in plenty. What you forget, is what a war IS. It is not a civil engineering project, where there is time to plan everything, and major mistakes must be due to criminal negligence. Also, in every article on the looting is a sentence to the effect, "boy the guys who stripped the dangerous stuff were pros - they loaded it into trucks and were gone". Well duh. The guys who who took it were part of Saddam's regime, and they took it before the Americans showed up to get in their way. The peasants came afterwards, and America was clearly unprepared for the orgy of looting, and unwilling to shoot the looters, which was the only way to stop it. Saddam turned all of Iraq into a weapons dump. There were literally thousands of sites. The difference between the oil wells and the weapons dumps was, the US troops knew beforehand where the wells were and that Saddam would try to blow them up. They didn't know beforehand where all these dumps were. For the limited sites that were under UN seal, you have a point, they should have secured them as fast as possible. If they had, they would have been able to better document the fact that they were looted before they got there.