Blog Archives
Cheney & Co.
Thursday, March 18, 2004
Yesterday, Cheney gave a speech in which he said that if John Kerry were president, Saddam Hussein would still be in power. (Because he voted against the $87 billion) So? And if Saddam were still in power, Mr. Vice President, what would it mean? It would mean that we were still in a policy of containment, not bleeding men and money in a war that can’t be won by force alone, in a country neither we nor our leadership understand, that does not want us there. It would mean that all those who have died violently in the past year would still be alive. It would mean that common sense might have prevailed over the policy of regime change. And maybe it would mean that America would take its rightful place as one among many nations who believe in the rule of law and democratic government and not some fantasy of an imperial world domination that appears to motivate the Bush people.
Hans von Sponeck in the Guardian of today :
As for the argument that war was the only way to remove Saddam Hussein, no human being lasts for ever. Saddam was very weakened. I have spoken to officials from his former regime who said at the end other senior officials, including Tariq Aziz (Saddam’s foreign minister) and General Ali Hassan al-Majid (Chemical Ali), were running the country in the last 12 months. Saddam Hussein was not the Saddam Hussein described to us as a danger to the US and Europe. That was absolute nonsense.
Yes Iraqis suffered under this man, but people in Iraq are not suffering any less in their daily life now, what order there was – even under a dictator – is gone. Whatever we see now is no fundamental improvement. “
Hans von Sponeck is the former UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq. He was responsible for administering the distribution of goods in Iraq under the Oil-For-Food program. He resigned his post in 2000 in protest against the effects of the Sanctions against Iraq.
A foreign policy based on willful ignorance?
A lot of very foolish things are being said by both sides in our American debate.
That electing Zapatero in Spain is appeasing the terrorists. (Neocons) How idiotic! Do not Spaniards have the right to oust a government that has lied to them and tried to control the news for its own political purposes? Are they not that messy democracy that Rumsfeld is always talking about and therefore free to choose as they wish? Besides, Spain has a longer experience with terror and terrorists than the USA, and much closer knowledge of countries and cultures on the other side of the Mediterranean.
That there is a conspiracy and a grand design to make the US into the one ruling imperial grand power with the rest of the world at the mercy of its military and economic might. (Peaceniks, Far Left) Even America may run out of money at the rate Bush is spending it! The theory of a vast extent of US bases in the Middle East starting with Iraq, seems economically undoable. We can’t support the military efforts that are already out there.
Tuesday, March 16, 2004
Hans Blix is always interesting, and always so completely sane and rational. He is one voice of reason in the roar of partisan controversy over the war in Iraq. Here are some key points from his interview with Bob Edwards.
“No weapons were found after 1994.” He also states that this fact has been pretty much ignored, and that by asking Iraq to prove that they no longer had weapons of mass destruction, we were asking them to prove a negative which is an extremely difficult if not impossible thing to do. When the UN inspectors returned to Iraq in November 2002, they inspected sites whose locations had been given them by the intelligence services, and found nothing. Although not completely convinced that it was wrong at this stage, Blix was definitely suspicious about the accuracy of the intelligence.
He talks about the buildup of arms in Kuwait and seeing it as pressure on the Iraqis to disarm, stating that if the allies had stopped about 50,000 troops, it could have been just enough pressure to make the Iraqis come forward and accept the renewal of inspections. That is what happened in reality. Saddam did indeed accept the inspectors. However, Blix also says that once the buildup had reached 300,000, the allies could not have withdrawn the troops without impossible-to-face embarrassment, so they were caught in having to go to war regardless of what the inspectors might find or the truth. They painted themselves into a corner with the size of the buildup, and from then on war was inevitable.
“The leadership did not exercise sufficient critical judgment.” This is pretty much what I’ve been talking about lately. Blix points out that intelligence is always guesswork, and I’ve already said somewhere in here how poor our past record is at such guesswork because we so seldom have our own qualified skeptics to check the accuracy of information brought to us by defectors and others with their own axes to grind. But the iffiness of intelligence is not the point. What is absolutely critical is the hard look at the guesswork that separates what is rumor and hearsay from verifiable, backed up sources that can be used as evidence to formulate policy. For some reason, this was where there was an abysmal failure on both sides of the Atlantic. It will be interesting to see what future investigations into the conduct of the war bring to light about motives for jumping to such wrong conclusions.
It is unbelievable to me that Chalabi is still being paid for his so-called intelligence, and that otherwise intelligent people would accept the words of this convicted criminal and power seeking person.
“They were 100% convinced there were weapons of mass destruction, and they had zero knowledge of where they were.” Just being convinced that something is true does not make it actually true. “if you sentence someone to war, you better have some evidence.” Conviction must be based on something more verifiable that simple belief or doubtful “intelligence”. Hans Blix illustrated this back in September when he compared Britain and the US to medieval witch hunters. “In the Middle Ages, when people were convinced there were witches, they certainly found them. This is a bit risky.”
And it is certain, in view of recent events in Spain and Iraq, that the world is not a safer place because Saddam Hussein is no longer the latter country’s brutal ruler.
Ironies and fantasies
Sunday, March 14, 2004
Curiously, no one brings up the subject of the rush to war. No one asks, What was the hurry?! Why not wait for actual facts on the ground rather than accept the unprovable? It is the rush to battle that makes people question the Administration’s motives and agenda. What did they have to lose by giving the inspectors time to finish their investigations of 2003? Why summarily throw them out in February after only 2 months? Fear that the war would lose what they’d been selling the public as its rationale? Even more important, why were so many swayed by the Administration’s insistence that they knew what reason should have told them they didn’t know at all?
(The above sections corrected, edited, amplified, and reposted on March 16, 2004)
A quote from Michael Ignatieff’s piece in the New York Times Magazine today:
“An administration that cared more genuinely about human rights would have understood that you can’t have human rights without order and that you can’t have order once victory is won if planning for an invasion is divorced from planning for an occupation. The administration failed to grasp that from the first moment an American tank column took a town, there had to be military police and civilian administrators following behind to guard museums, hospitals, water-pumping stations and electricity generators and to stop looting, revenge killings and crime. Securing order would have meant putting 250,000 troops into the invasion as opposed to 130,000. It would have meant immediately retaining and retraining the Iraqi Army and police, instead of disbanding them. The administration, which never tires of telling us that hope is not a plan, had only hope for a plan in Iraq.”
I’m not sure I follow the reasoning Mr. Ignatieff gives for supporting the effort to remove Saddam except that he appears to have accepted the theory that since Saddam had used chemical weapons before, he could not be trusted not to use them again or try to pass on what he was building to terror groups. The Iran war took place in the 80’s (1980-1988). Chemical weapons were used against the Kurds in 1988. Something must have changed inside Saddam’s military as they were not used against Kuwait or in the 1991 Gulf War in spite of our fears to the contrary.
Now, after a year of ad hoc blunders in Iraq, newspapers report efforts to secure Iraq’s long borders. Why wait for a year? Would Sistani have come back if the border between Iran and Iraq had not been almost totally open? But little or no thought was apparently given to the need to secure against fundamentalists from other countries which could not be done anyway with only 130,000 troops.
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I bought a DVD player on sale thinking I could just hook it to my present TV. Ha! The old thing, which still works great just has no inputs other than one for Cable. So I guess I’ll have to invest in a new TV even though I don’t really need one just so I can rent DVD’s and watch the movies I’ve missed. Life in America! How we get trapped into spending our hard-earned dollars on the latest technology. A digital TV is way off my retirement budget. Just too expensive. I could wait until the price comes down in a year or so, but what if it doesn’t? And all the new sets have gotten almost too big for my living room.
Saturday, March 06, 2004
Today I have found on the internet a speech given by former Vice President Al Gore on the Politics of Fear. This speech was given at the New School University in New York and can be found here . It is a webcast of his speech. He is far harsher than I was back in October of 2002, and says passionately that the Bush Administration has used the fear produced by the plane attacks of 9/11 to manipulate and mislead the American people into believing his statements on the complicity of Iraq in the twin tower tragedy, to believe the insistance that he, Bush, knew that Iraq had WMD and Nuclear weapons, to swallow fictitious link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, and allow the violation of constitutional rights in the arrest and holding without trial of American citizens. He gets at the media appeal to emotion rather than reason as the motivator for action.
areesandeirene.com 