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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: one_less who wrote (67535)	5/31/2006 2:43:28 PM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 173976

I see military, education, economic, diplomatic, and social movement all in play. The violence in Iraq should not be confused with a military operation. Yes, there are soldiers and guns and a lot of dead people, but there is no army to fight. It's only a series of killings and counter-reprisals that has no strategic goal. That is not a military operation. TP

To: one_less who wrote (67535)	5/31/2006 3:38:06 PM
From: jttmab	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 173976

I see military, education, economic, diplomatic, and social movement all in play. And which direction are they heading. Military: As the Iraqis stand up; we'll stand down. 200,000 Iraqis trained and we're sending in emergency forces. And the attacks on coalition forces as going way up. Education: It was a sectartian education before Saddam fell. The recent history books distributed in Iraq make no mention of Saddam Hussein. He isn't in their history! A teacher in Badhdad said that he couldn't say anything bad about Saddam, otherwise the Sunni parents would kill him. He couldn't say anything good about Saddam because the Shia parents would kill him. Reading a Q&A on BBC. An Iraqi teacher said, the only thing they fixed was the facade of the school. They did nothing on the inside and all they have is one light bulb dangling from the ceiling. And didn't have electricity most of the day. Economic: 60% unemployment. According to a survey of thousands of households conducted by the Iraqi government and Unicef. Severe malnutrition among children is twice as high as it was under Saddam [2000]. Oil production... Diplomatic: Sure. A group of men and women sitting in AC offices inside the green zone are working are trying to figure out who the Ministry of Security [?] is going to be. Social movement: True. At the beginning of the Iraq war, Shia and Sunni pretty much tolerated each other, now they are more than happy to cut each other's throat. We have no appreciation for what our little democracy experiment for the ME has put these people through. As the US doesn't really care how many people die in Iraq, we don't have even a rough count on how many Iraqis have died, let alone severely injured. But I'll throw a number on the table, feel free to use another number if you think you have a better one. 50,000 dead. To get some sense of the scale of this tradgedy, let's scale it to the US. The US has a population of more than 10 times that or Iraq. The puts the scale of the tradgedy equivalent to 500,000 Americans. The US public doesn't think 2500 Americans is worth it. What would the public think if we suffered a half a million casualties. Is it your contention that as long as we have military operations [in Iraq], there can be no effective political solution? I'm there now. I denied it to myself for too long. And the longer we stay the worse it will be for the Iraqis when we do leave. But we're not going to leave now. And I can tell you exactly why we won't. Because it would look "bad". Even when we [this Administration or the next one] come to the conclusion that it is not winnable, we'll look for an exit strategy so we can say. "We won, the Iraqis lost." And the Iraqis will suffer far more than they're suffering now. jttmab

To: one_less who wrote (67535)	5/31/2006 3:47:20 PM
From: jttmab	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 173976

Here's part of a post I put up earlier extracted from an article on Kissenger's notes recently released by the national Archives.... ----------------------------------- On this Memorial Day we honor the service of our men and women that gave the ultimate sacrifice for their country. It's important that we put their sacrifice in perspective. President Nixon's envoy told Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, "If we can live with a communist government in China, we ought to be able to accept it in Indochina." Kissinger told Zhou the United States respected its Hanoi enemy as a "permanent factor" and probably the "strongest entity" in the region. "And we have had no interest in destroying it or even defeating it," Pressed by Zhou, Kissinger further acknowledged that a communist takeover by force might be tolerated if it happened long enough after a U.S. withdrawal. --------------------------------------------- End Now we can ask ourselves what Nixon and Kissinger were telling the American people while they were talking to China. In particular let me call your attention to the last note above. ... we were willing to "accept" a forceable takeover of South Vietnam by the North as long as they waited a respectable period of time. Why wait? So it wouldn't look "bad". Kissinger wanted to say, as he does to this very day. ~"We won, the South Vietnamese lost." jttmab

To: one_less who wrote (67535)	5/31/2006 4:11:15 PM
From: jttmab	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 173976

This will be the sixth time the US has screwed the Iraqi people. The first time was when the US accepted Saddam as a friendly country when the US lost Iran as a source of oil. The second time we screwed the Iraqis was when we assisted in continuance of the Iraq-Iran war so neither one would be THE regional power. Let them kill each other so neither one would dominate the region. The third time we screwed the Iraqis was when Saddam gassed the Kurds and the US initially blamed Iran. We couldn't pull that off indefinitely and we ignored it there after. The fourth time we screwed the Iraqi people was after Desert Storm, when we pursuaded the Shia to overthrow Saddam. They tried, they died and we watched. Too bad. The fifth time we screwed the Iraqi people was with stupid sanctions. Now we're on to the sixth screw job. jttmab