Al Qaeda hurting for money, resigned to defeat in Afghanistan

The French, Germans, and Russians were into Saddam's pockets. I'm sorry if their sanctimony is lost on me.

I don't mean to disprespect the dead, but Saddam deserved to go. If we had gone in with an even stronger coalition (i.e. to include the French, Germans and Russians) maybe we wouldn't still be dealing with the insurgents that we are.

 

I'm even going to set aside the facts that it was unethical and illogical (so many ways of going about this...), if Saddam deserved to go as you say, the continued support of the Saudi royal family and Mubarak is complete hypocrisy.

 

On the countrary, if we would have waited till we had more troops out of Afghanistan, or better yet, established a legit reason to attack Iraq, then we wouldnt be dealing with these insurgents and trying to place the blame on nuetral countries.

 

Yet how come the French, German, and Russia signed on for Gulf War I? Most of the debts Saddam wracked up were from prior to Gulf War I yet that didn't stop those countries from entering the war.

 

It is always a mistake to make wholesale comments based on membership of a group. There are many Germans. Some of them are pedophiles. Some of them worship Satan. Some beileve in bringing back the Third Reich. Similar comments can be made about French, Russians, and even Americans.

I trust you wouldn't say that Russians, French, Germans, and Americans are Satanic Nazi pedophiles.

The evidence, unless something has changed, is that individual corporations, some rogue Russian ministries, and some independently acting French diplomats were involved in violating the imbargo on Iraq for personal profit. Your comments imply that the full force of these governments and their people were behind violations.

As a tangent, there is evidence that a large amout of the oil which was the exchange medium ended up in he United States. Does that make you responsable as an oil-consuming American?

I'm not sure who the dead are that you speak of, but I think most people agree that Saddam deserved to go and was a really bad guy. This brings up two corollaries, however.

First, if you examine the history of war, there have been many reasons, both good and bad, for starting conflict. If one simply looks at the goal for starting a war and assuming that goal is a positive outcome and the starting point is a baseline, the results are negative as often as they are positive.

Off the top of my head -

Iraq/Iran War - Stalemate depleated Iraqi military.
Soviet War in Afghanistan - Ended the Soviet Union.
First Arab-Israeli War - Israel was not destroyed and actually grew.
The Korean War - North Korea was returned to the stone age.
Israeli Occupation of Southern Lebanon - Israel had to retreat by 2000

From my best estimate, slightly less than 1/2 of wars that were initiated by people in the last 2 centuries ended with "worse" circumstances than those which were sufficent to start the war.

Secondly, even in apparent victory the seeds of hatred are often sown. Eventually, these come back to haunt the supposed "victor".

The US involvement in the Vietnam war was a result of continued French supression of revolts in Indochina. Every uprising but the final one was a French victory. When you kill someone's father in war, even if it's justified, the children will view that as a crime against them and when they grow up they will become millitant.

Also, trace the trail of animosity from the Franco-Prussian War, to WWI, and WWII. An element of bad blood from the previous war fueled the wars that followed. The only way this cycle was eventually broken was by basically raizing Germany and killing so many Germans that those that were left were willing to submit unquestioningly to the victors.

The point here is that once you start a war, much worse nightmare situations are the result as often as victory, and no mater how justified you are, you will always create a generation more of people who remember you as the person who killed their mother, father, or brother.

You had better, therefore, be sure that the potential cost of not going to war is so high that you are desperate enough to risk a roll of the dice. Some of the reasons claimed before the war might qualify. If Sadam was building nuclear weapons with the goal of nuking the west, or if he was building an army large and powerful enough to invade the entire middle east, it might be reasonable to roll the dice. These reasons, however, have not turned out to be true.

"He was a bad guy" has never been an acceptable reason for war. I think 1/3 of the heads of state in the world qualify under those criteria. As it turns out, we have replaced one evil with another. Even if we manage to set up a solid government, we have generated a great deal of emnity that will fester and grow.

BTW, I don't think anybody who ever payed attention to Afghanistan ever thought we'd "won" completely. The situation has always been that cities were isolated islands of law floating in a sea of lawless countryside. Afghanistan is a perfect example of the difficulty of cleaning up a bloody war. Essentially, the Afghan situation should be accepted as a long and slow one as we are cleaning up the result of 1.5 million civilians who died in the 10 year Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. That created quite a bit of nihlistic hatred, anger and destruction. Cleaning that up will be a long process.

 

evidence please? are you suggesting, if only we'd articulated our reasons better, zarqawhi and his cohorts would have thought, "hmmmmmm, that bush dude, he talks some sense. let's boogie on down the road and let him have his way here."

don't think so....

 

Do you find the claim that this war in Iraq was only Gulf War-- Part Deux to be an illegitimate claim?

 

Yes. The claim that Gulf War I never ended is erroneous because there was an official cease fire and the UN Resolutions mandating further actions required another vote of the UNSC to ratify, a vote that never took place. Further while technically neither Gulf War I or II had an official Congressional declaration of war there were two separate votes mandating operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom. If it was one war then none of those votes would've been required. From the UN situation the second Gulf War wasn't mandated by the UNSC which mandated the first one and from the US standpoint for practical purposes there were the equivalent of two declarations of war.

There is a stronger argument for saying that 3 major Israeli / Arab conflicts were one war than that Gulf War I and II were the same.

 

Who would you rather believe?

I'm trying to spare bigtexxx from responding to this.

Reuters = TRASH

Al Qaeda in Iraq says Zawahri letter is fake: Web

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsA...KOC_0_US-IRAQ-QAEDA-LETTER.xml&archived=False

DUBAI (Reuters) - Al Qaeda's wing in Iraq on Thursday rejected as a fabrication a letter by top group leader Ayman al-Zawahri which was issued by U.S. officials this week, according to an Internet posting.

"We in Al Qaeda Organization announce that there is no truth to these claims, which are only based on the imagination of the politicians of the Black (White) House and their slaves," the group said in a statement posted on an Islamist Web site.

According to the letter, released this week by U.S. intelligence officials, al Qaeda's second in command Zawahri urged the group's leader in Iraq to prepare for an Islamic government to take over the country when U.S. forces leave. He said brutal tactics risked alienating Muslims.

"This is proof of the obvious bankruptcy plaguing the infidels' camp," said the statement signed by the group's spokesman in Iraq.

"All of this is in a letter attributed to our Mujahid sheikh...and naturally we do not know how and where this letter is to have been found," it added.

U.S. officials said the July 9 letter, addressed to Iraq's al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was obtained during counter-terrorism operations in Iraq.

The letter, which appeared to show divisions between Zarqawi and al Qaeda's top leaders, was released days before Iraqis were to vote in a referendum on a new constitution in which U.S. authorities hope for a large turnout among Sunni Muslim Arabs.

Many Sunni Arabs oppose Saturday's referendum, however, and some experts believe Zarqawi declared war on Iraq's majority Shi'ite population last month to curry favor among the disaffected.

The Zawahri letter warned Zarqawi the killing of Shi'ite civilians and hostages risked alienating Sunnis at a time when al Qaeda in Iraq should be seeking popular support for a new religious state.