It's better then being delusional. Where have you been the last 6 months? Where were you yesterday? Do you read the news? If I'm mistaken, point to a time when were subject to even less good will than we are now. It's called the DEFENSE Department, not the war machine and it was not decimated. If it was, how were we able to take on the Afghanistan mission so quickly and effectively? This idea was an election year strawman, no more. And our deficit is not necessary, though the way we've arrived at it might be evil. Read history. Read the above article. Nothing's impossible and even if you think it is, should one go tempting fate just because one can? Yes we did. The US is using NATO as a backdoor to force cooperation from France and Germany. If the shoe were on the other foot, you'd be crying blackmail. There are many ways of looking at an issue. We've framed this one as either/or but we're the only ones (with maybe Blair as well) who look at it that way. It seems to me we're threatening to pick up our marbles and go play by ourselves if things don't turn out the way we want them to instead of engaging and looking for alternatives. Just because we are the strongest militarily doesn't mean we can't use that strength in a quiet way to reach accommodation. I didn't say I had, it's the precedents that worry me. Just because one was not a blacklisted Hollywood writer in the 1950's or an imprisoned Japanese-American in the 1940's does not mean one was not affected and the ideals of our country weakened. Tell me, aside from the ones near the White House, where were these? What are the new ones protecting us from? Saddam's Air Force can't reach the Monument. Osama has no air force. No country who has missles that can reach Washington is going to fire them. Either we're saying the reforms since 9/11 haven't worked or still have holes in them or we are doing this to establish a mindset in this country.
Old Europe's Duplicity By Duane D. Freese "Secretary of State Colin Powell presented the United Nations and a global television audience yesterday with the most powerful case to date that Saddam Hussein stands in defiance of Security Council resolutions," intoned the ever wary, anti-Bush administration New York Times. "Powell lays out convincing evidence," USA Today's editorial stepped up. "I'm persuaded," wrote Washington Post syndicated columnist Mary McGrory. "Irrefutable," the Washington Post editorial went to the mat. Those reactions from generally liberal media icons amount to a grand slam for Secretary of State Colin Powell in his speech to the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday. There is no question that the evidence presented by Powell before the council gave the media and the public a clearer view of the duplicity of Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi regime. And those with an open mind will accept the proof. Only, as conservative columnist George Will noted, those "people committed to a particular conclusion will get to it and will stay there." And there are a number of them. The ever Bush-disparaging 82-year-old Hearst columnist Helen Thomas at a White House news briefing on Thursday insisted again, without any evidence, that "isn't this just about oil?" And an equally unclear thinking, Nelson Mandela, declared: "We are not going to listen to the United States of America." And Congresswoman Maxine Waters can tell CNN's Talkback live audience, "We shouldn't act without proof." A fringe left-wing journalist; an aged, if respected, revolutionary and a rabidly partisan member of Congress can get away with such self-delusion because they aren't privy to the most secret intelligence and they don't hold people's lives in their hands. But Western leaders are privy to such information and do. So, they can't get away with delusional thinking. The most troubling thing about both Powell's presentation and the reaction to it by some leaders is that those leaders, by playing as ignorant pacifists, actually increase the likelihood, even the necessity, for using force in Iraq. McGrory in her column said she was "as tough as France to convince" that "Saddam Hussein, with his stockpiles of nerve gas and death-dealing chemicals, is more of a menace than I had thought." But the point is, French President Jacque Chirac, and with him, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, shouldn't have needed any convincing of Hussein's danger. They knew Hussein was shuffling and hiding and cheating and retreating. Their intelligence services had to have told them. In regards to France, its Defense Ministry spokesperson Jean-Francois Bureau admitted as much Thursday when he answered questions about what French intelligence knew by saying, "There are a certain number of questions evoked by Mr. Powell that we had information on. Others, perhaps less." What did Chirac know and when did he know it? Well, he had to know about Iraq's Al Qaeda connections that Powell exposed Thursday prior to Jan. 20. Britain had found the deadly poison ricin in a northeast London home Jan. 5 and broke into a mosque on Jan. 20 arresting seven people that British Prime Minister Tony Blair connected to Al Qaeda. At the same time, Spanish anti-terrorist forces arrested 16 suspected Al Qaeda terrorists in the process of launching chemical attacks. And where did the Spanish get their tip? From French police, after a police raid there had gathered in a terrorist cell in Paris. Yet, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin on Jan. 20 sandbagged Powell at a U.N. meeting on terrorism that he had gotten Powell to attend when he declared: "If war is the only way to resolve this problem, we are going down a dead end. Already we know for a fact that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs are being largely blocked, even frozen. We must do everything possible to strengthen this process." Will called de Villepin oleaginous - oily, overly ingratiating. In truth, he and his master, Chirac, demonstrated at that point, knowing what they had to know about Saddam and the terrorists, that they were duplicitous. Meanwhile, German Prime Schroeder was even worse. Back in August, in an attempt to curry favor with pacifist German sentiment, he said, "As far as military intervention against Iraq goes, I believe we should be restrained. That means that Germany will not participate." Prior to Powell presenting his new evidence to the United Nations, he vowed again that Germans would "'not let up in our efforts to resolve this conflict without a war." For a president of a nation to unilaterally rule out the use of force ahead of time is basically to tell the enemy: Do your worst, we don't care. To do so in the face of intelligence that demonstrates a grave threat to one's people defies sanity. Schroeder knew in November As The New York Times reported on Feb. 3, a confidential government memorandum from German Health minister Ulla Schmidt last fall warned: "It is to be assumed that countries such as North Korea and Iraq have access to viral strains that could present a potential threat. It was stated earlier that no one would use these because of the risk of self-injury, but it is the case, given the numerous suicide bomber attacks, that there is a completely different situation. Therefore, the danger cannot be excluded that someone could infect himself to launch a suicide attack." That Schroeder took the threat seriously is demonstrated by his agreeing in mid-December to launch a $118 million program for stockpiling smallpox vaccine for all of Germany's 82 million people. Yet as an opposition legislator Friedbert Pflueger, an influential Christian Democratic Union legislator from Hanover, said in an interview quoted in the Times' story that the Schroeder's government continued to try "to give the impression that it is a fantasy of George W. Bush that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction." This had the effect, as Pflueger noted, of misleading the German people about the dangers of Iraq. Indeed, both Chirac and Schroeder have misled their citizens about the threat that Iraq poses. Despite knowing the reality of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, they continued to put the onus on the Bush administration to proving that he had any, leading to the false impression among many people that inspectors would be a sufficient means to contain Hussein's ambition. Worse than that, though, they also provided comfort to Hussein that he could play the old game of cheat and retreat because those opposing him were divided in actually dealing with his weaponry, and thus action against him might again be forestalled as it was throughout most of the 1990s. The new reality created after Sept. 11th made such a miscalculation, as Powell noted, impossible. President Bush on Thursday said, "The game is over." His target was Iraq, but it is time that Chirac and Schroeder get the message, too. Their playing ignorant, putting the burden on the United States to prove Iraq was a danger, their unwillingness to stand united behind measures to disarm him, has done nearly as much to necessitate the use of force against Saddam as Saddam's own game playing. http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/defensewrapper.jsp?PID=1051-350&CID=1051-020703G We should have withdrawn our troops from Germany years ago for reasons that have nothing to do with the current crisis. We still should. But Rumsfeld ought to keep his mouth shut about it... Or at least give the diplospeak version of the reasons why.
Wait, if I am delusional, how would I know? Yes, we were much more hated during the 1980's. Remember the Iranian Hostage Crisis, the boycotted Olympics, the attack on the Lebanese Marine Barracks, and especially The Evil Empire that we helped dismantle (freeing half the ungrateful Germans)? The Arab world, China, and the Soviet Bloc made up almost half of the world's population, and their state controlled media filled the minds of their people with anti-American rhetoric daily. North Korea is causing trouble now because they know we can't fight on multiple fronts. We were naive in our threat assessments during the 1990's, and now we are being forced to rebuild our military during a trough in the business cycle. Our deficit is necessary because we have to defend ourselves. France and Germany need us, we need them, and free market democracies never go to war. In a couple of years, all of this tension will be history. No, we are asking France and Germany to honor their NATO commitments. Turkey has been threatened by Iraq, and if France and Germany don't help protect Turkey, then NATO will be meaningless. This has nothing to do with attacking Iraq to force compliance. You are suggesting that it is permissable for the UN to make idle threats to Iraq. 1441 threatens severe consequences if Iraq does not comply with inspection teams. France's idea of severe consequences is to triple the number of inspectors. If this is allowed to stand, than we are sending a message to the world community that the UN is a paper tiger. That is very true, but I still don't see where ordinary citizens have lost any rights. I know we have locked up an American citizen without due process, but he trained with Al Queda in Pakistan (or Afghanistan?). Part of living in a free society is accepting that we can't control all the risks. A private pilot with WMD could take off from Northern Virginia and be a threat.
Is this a credible news report? Is Rumsfeld nuts?? I just find this difficult to believe. As has been said, he is the Secretary of DEFENSE. There is no way he would seriously contemplate this scenario without approval from the White House. And that speaks volumes about the incompetency of the Administration. If this plays out as described, I would be appalled... and I would be shocked if Colin Powell didn't resign. I really feel for the guy. Unbelievable!
bringing...back...horrid memories of the "Joe Millionaire" thread!!!!!!!!!!!!!! how can i be expected to go on now?
We compare our fight to the one in Afganistan, EVEN THOUGH they were having a civil war before. It would have been hard to set up a puppet government in there but if we really wanted to, we would've. When, not if but when, we invade Iraq, we are going to use THEIR oil to fund our occupation, and to an extent set a puppet government. We aren't going to put an Abdul Karim Kassem into power, a leader whom the Iraqis liked, I wouldn't doubt the people would view this as a zionist plot or all about oil, and would attempt quite a few coups.
How about this? "The <i>German</i> administration in 1 year has done more damage to their international credibility then maybe any German administration in a very long time - except maybe Hitler's." It goes both ways. Germany is not opposed to disarming Iraq because of "moral" reasons but because of commercial and economic ones. "Peace" just conveniently works out to be on "their" side this time.
My point exactly. I doubt it. The government of the Soviet Union was no friend, but there was not huge animosity among the Russian people. Same with China. There was a big no-nukes movement in western Europe, but nothing like we're seeing today. Total cost to the budget of Bush's tax cuts = $4.4 trillion. Cost of military in this year's budget = $390 billion + cost of the Iraq War, estimated at $60-70 million. Do the math. Who said anything about us going to war with France or Germany? The tension will only be history if Bush is not elected and all these yahoos like Rumsfeld find themselves out of a job. When did Iraq threaten to invade Turkey? It's my understanding that we went to NATO and said we want you to commit now in case Turkey gets attacked. We were trying to get France, Germany, and Belgium to commit to a de facto support of our position on Iraq. The compromise out of NATO today is that NATO will begin planning for such an eventuality. I'm glad to see your concern with the image of the United Nations. It's quite touching and I admire your desire to save face for the UN instead of finding a way to save lives. From an AP story--The USA Patriot Act, passed after the Sept. 11 attacks, gave the FBI new powers to investigate terrorism, including the ability to look at library records and computer hard drives to see what books patrons have checked out, what Web pages they've visited, and where they've sent e-mails. The Department of Justice says the new powers are needed to identify terrorist cells. But some librarians, who were meeting in Philadelphia for an American Library Association convention, worry that the FBI has returned to routinely checking on the reading habits of intellectuals, civil rights leaders and other Americans. Those tactics, common in the 1950s and 1960s, were occasionally used to brand people as Communists. ______________ Donna Huanca works as a docent at the Art Car Museum, an avant-garde gallery in Houston. Around 10:30 on the morning of November 7, before she opened the museum, two men wearing suits and carrying leather portfolios came to her door. "I told them to wait until we opened at 11:00," she recalls. "Then they pulled their badges out." The two men were Terrence Donahue of the FBI and Steven Smith of the Secret Service. "They said they had several reports of anti-American activity going on here and wanted to see the exhibit," she says. The museum was running a show called "Secret Wars," which contains many anti-war statements that were commissioned before September 11. "They just walked in, so I went through with them and gave them a very detailed tour. I asked them if they were familiar with the artists and what the role of art was at a critical time like this," she says. "They were more interested in where the artists were from. They were taking some notes. They were pointing out things that they thought were negative, like a recent painting by Lynn Randolph of the Houston skyline burning, and a devil dancing around, and with George Bush Sr. in the belly of the devil." There was a surreal moment when they inspected another element of the exhibit. "We had a piece in the middle of the room, a mock surveillance camera pointed to the door of the museum, and they wondered whether they were being recorded," she says. All in all, they were there for about an hour. "As they were leaving, they asked me where I went to school, and if my parents knew if I worked at a place like this, and who funded us, and how many people came in to see the exhibit," she says. "I was definitely pale. It was scary because I was alone, and they were really big guys." Before the agents left the museum, Huanca called Tex Kerschen, the curator of the exhibit. "I had just put down a book on COINTELPRO," he says, referring to the FBI's program of infiltrating leftwing groups in the 1960s. "Donna's call confirmed some of my worst suspicions. Donna was frightened, and we're all a little bit shocked that they were going to act against a small art space, to bring to bear that kind of menace, an atmosphere of dread. These old moldy charges of 'anti-American,' 'un-American'--they seem laughable at first, like we can't be accused of anything that silly. But they've started coming down with this." The director of the Art Car Museum is James Harithas, who served as the director of the Corcoran Art Museum in Washington, D.C., in the late 1960s. "It's unbelievable," he says of the visit from the G-men. "People should be worried that their freedoms are being taken away right and left." Robert Dogium, a spokesman for the FBI in Houston, says the visit was a routine follow-up on a call "from someone who said there was some material or artwork that was of a threatening nature to the President." He says it was no big thing. "While the work there was not their cup of tea, it was not considered of a threatening nature to anybody or terrorism or anything." She is a freshman at Durham Tech in North Carolina. Her name is A.J. Brown. She's gotten a scholarship from the ACLU to help her attend college. But that didn't prepare her for the knock on the door that came on October 26. "It was 5:00 on Friday, and I was getting ready for a date," she says. When she heard the knock, she opened the door. Here's her account. "Hi, we're from the Raleigh branch of the Secret Service," two agents said. "And they flip out their little ID cards, and I was like, 'What?' "And they say, 'We're here because we have a report that you have un-American material in your apartment.' And I was like, 'What? No, I don't have anything like that.' " 'Are you sure? Because we got a report that you've got a poster that's anti-American.' "And I said no." They asked if they could come into the apartment. "Do you have a warrant?" Brown asked. "And they said no, they didn't have a warrant, but they wanted to just come in and look around. And I said, 'Sorry, you're not coming in.' " One of the agents told Brown, "We already know what it is. It's a poster of Bush hanging himself," she recalls. "And I said no, and she was like, 'Well, then, it's a poster with a target on Bush's head,' and I was like, nope." The poster they seemed interested in was one that depicted Bush holding a rope, with the words: "We Hang on Your Every Word. George Bush, Wanted: 152 Dead." The poster has sketches of people being hanged, and it refers to the number who were put to death in Texas while Bush was governor, she explains. Ultimately, Brown agreed to open her door so that the agents could see the poster on the wall of her apartment, though she did not let them enter. "They just kept looking at the wall," which contained political posters from the Bush counter-inaugural, a "Free Mumia" poster, a picture of Jesse Jackson, and a Pink Floyd poster with the quotation: "Mother, should I trust the government?" At one point in the conversation, one of the agents mentioned Brown's mother, saying, "She's in the armed forces, isn't she?" (Her mother, in fact, is in the Army Reserve.) After they were done inspecting the wall, one of the agents "pulled out his little slip of paper, and he asked me some really stupid questions, like, my name, my Social Security number, my phone number," she says. "Then they asked, 'Do you have any pro-Taliban stuff in your apartment, any posters, any maps?' "I was like, 'No, I don't, and personally, I think the Taliban is just a bunch of assholes.' " With that, they left. They had been at her apartment for forty minutes. "They called me two days later to make sure my information was correct: where I lived, my phone number (hello!), and my nicknames," she says. Brown says she's "really annoyed" about the Secret Service visit. "Obviously, I'm on some list somewhere." _____________ the "Patriot Act" — gives the government powers to arrest suspects and detain them almost indefinitely, deport them, hold them in solitary confinement, open their mail, tap their phones, monitor their email and search their homes without a warrant. Some 1,200 foreigners have been secretly arrested, and more than 600 are still in prison, although no court has found them guilty. Many have not been brought before a judge and they have been denied access to lawyers. The US government has also announced its intention to interrogate 5,000 men between 16 and 45, currently in the US on tourist visas, who are regarded as suspect just because they come from the Middle East. I agree, but if we start to control all the risks, are we still free?
I agree with the assessment of the German administration's foreign policy (except the STUPID Hitler reference), but since when is Germany opposed to disarming Iraq?
Rimrocker- You should have acknowledged my setting you up for the "delusional" response. Playing the straight man in these exchanges is thankless work. I can't believe you maintain that there is more anti-American tension today than during the Cold War. We will have to just disagree on that point. Kennedy and Reagan showed us that tax cuts increase tax revenue during times like this. Iraq threatened to invade Turkey if the Turks allow the UN to launch coalition forces from Turkish bases. Turkey needs NATO funds to rightfully defend itself against a very probable attack. France and Germany have decided that their NATO obligations are now conditional, so NATO is in danger of becoming irrelevant. Saddam has killed 1,000,000 of his people. Attacking Iraq and killing Saddam will save countless lives. If you really care about ending death and suffering in the Arab world, then you can no longer tolerate dictators like Saddam maintaining their power. As for your AP story about citizens losing their rights, I can only say puuuhleeeezzzzzeeeee. Two citizens were questioned by government officials. If that is how you define "lost rights", then how the heck are law enforcement officials supposed to succeed in the fight against organized terrorism?
If you're curious about why Germany's foreign policy seems so hostile towards the US, perhaps a little look into who the architect of that policy is will clear things up? Germany's Mr. Tough Guy By Michael Kelly Wednesday, February 12, 2003; Page A29 "Excuse me. I am not convinced." -- German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, lecturing to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in Munich last week, after Rumsfeld's argument for war against Iraq. Mr. Rumsfeld may have convinced the leaders of 18 European nations, but not you, Mr. Fischer. It's personal. This seems to me the right way to look at it. The question of failing to convince must be seen in the context of whom we have failed to convince. Sometimes "who" explains "why." Mr. Fischer, who are you? You are the foreign minister of Germany. You have been that since 1998, when Germany's left-wing Greens party, of which you are a leader, won enough in the polls to force the Social Democratic Party into the so-called Red-Greens coalition government. But for the formative years of your political life, you were no man in a blue government suit. You were a man in a black motorcycle helmet. That is what you were wearing on that day in April 1973 when you were photographed, to quote the New Left historian Paul Berman, "as a young bully in a street battle in Frankfurt." In 2001, Stern magazine published five photographs of you in action that day. What these pictures depicted was described by Berman in a deeply informed 25,000-word article, "The Passion of Joschka Fischer" (The New Republic, Sept. 3, 2001). The photos showed you, Mr. Fischer, inflicting a "gruesome beating" on a young policeman named Rainer Marx: "Fischer and other people on the attack, the white-helmeted cop going into a crouch; Fischer's black-gloved fist raised as if to punch the crouching cop on the back; Fischer's comrades crowding around; the cop huddled on the ground, Fischer and his comrades appearing to kick him . . ." As Berman reported, Mr. Fischer, you rose in public life as an important figure in the anti-American, anti-liberal, neo-Marxist, revolution-minded German radical left of the generation of 1968. This was the left that produced and supported the Baader-Meinhof Gang (or Red Army Faction), which, as Berman wrote, "refrained from nothing," including "kidnappings, bank holdups, murders." You were not a terrorist yourself, but you were a good and active friend to terrorists, weren't you, Mr. Fischer? In 1976, to protest the death in prison of Baader-Meinhof founder Ulrike Meinhof, you planned and participated in a Frankfurt demonstration in which, Berman wrote, "somebody tossed a Molotov cocktail at a policeman and burned him nearly to death." You were arrested but not charged. In 2001, Meinhof's daughter, Bettina Rohl (who gave those damning photos to Stern) told the press that you were responsible for the throwing of that firebomb. Other contemporary witnesses, Berman reported, said that you "had never ruled out the use of Molotovs and may even have favored it." You denied it, for the record. In 2001 the German government put on trial your old friend Hans-Joachim Klein, who had been an underground "soldier" in the Revolutionary Cells, an ally of the Red Army Faction and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The Revolutionary Cells helped in the murder of the Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich in 1972, and Klein himself took part in a 1975 joint assassination operation with Carlos the Jackal in which three were killed. During your testimony at Klein's trial, you were accused of having harbored Red Army Faction members in your Revolutionary Struggle house, the Frankfurt center for the group Revolutionary Struggle, which you co-founded with housemate Daniel "Danny the Red" Cohn-Bendit. You were forced to admit there was some truth in the accusation after it was revealed, as Berman reported, that Margrit Schiller, "who had served jail time for her connections to the Red Army Faction," had in her memoirs "plainly stated that she had spent a 'few days' in the early 1970s living in the Revolutionary Struggle house." (After your testimony, you shook hands with your old terrorist friend Klein. Sweet.) In 1969, you attended the meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization in which the PLO resolved that its ultimate aim was the extinction of Israel -- that is to say, the extinction or expulsion of the Jews of Israel. Seven years later, Revolutionary Cells terrorists led by your Frankfurt colleague, Wilfried Boese, hijacked an Air France plane to Entebbe, Uganda. The hijackers intended to murder all the Jewish passengers on that flight but were killed by Israeli commandos. "Suddenly," Berman wrote, "the implication of anti-Zionism struck home to [Fischer]. What did it mean that, back in Algiers in 1969, the PLO, with the young Fischer in attendance, had voted the Zionist entity into extinction? Now he knew what it meant." So, that's who you are, Mr. Fischer, the man we haven't convinced. You are the man for whom Munich wasn't enough, the man who needed Entebbe to convince him that murdering Jews was wrong. You ask to be excused. You have been excused. © 2003 The Washington Post Company Their foreign minister was a freakin' terrorist. Makes Rumsfeld look like a choir boy... (corroborating stories available on request if this seems too outlandish to be true...)
Rumsfeld is not Secretary of State. It is not for him to make foreign policy, regardless of who the German foreign minister is. If this is true, then Rumsfeld is saying and doing what the Administration wants him to say and do. He is too intelligent to be doing this on his own.
treeman, everything in that article is true. But your conclusion that he was a terrorist is not. He was a radical left wing protester, but he was not a terrorist. He has changed a lot during the years and I actually believe that change. Personally, I actually like him, although he does not represent my political views. I just don't like the foreign policy of Germany's current government.
I stand corrected. Joschka Fischer was not a terrorist, he was just a man who publicly beat a cop nearly to death, threw a molotov cocktail at another, apparently harbors a deep hatred for the United States, and used to buddy around with Red German and Palestinian terrorists. Distinction duly noted. I don't really like the foreign policy of Germany's current government either, for what it's worth.
