Another poster who I'll let take the credit (blame?) said recently that he didn't think that we had gained all that much from the Gulf War. I certainly agree. GAINS: 1) Kuwait monarchy was restored. I don't view this as much of real gain for the US. I know you can make an argument that we believe absolutely that no nation should ever invade another nation. I just don't think that history shows we value that concept that absolutely. If we value human rights, women's rights and democracy we will still have to hope the monarchy is replaced. 2) Sadam doesn't control more oil. This is very true, but not sure how important that really is. After all we got by realtively well without the oil from either Iraq or Kuwait for a time period. In addition the oil is worthless without the West buying it. The same oil from the same oil fields would be flowing to us whoever controlled it. 3) We destroyed some of Sadam's weapons of mass destruction. ( I hate this propagandistic term since most countries of any size including the US have weapons of mass destruction.) Short of permanent occupation, Iraq as a major middle eastern country will always be either building or buying these types of weapons as the Saudi, the Israelis and the rest of the countries to. 4) We kept him from invading Saudi Arabia. There is no reliable evidence that this was contemplated. If that were to have occurred we could have undone that, too. The Saudis are a corrupt monarchy that espouses a version of radical muslim thought. They should not be viewed as worthy allies. 5) We weakend Iraq for a very long time. Our boycott and destruction of the sewers, waer supplies and electical grids and other infrastructure did accomplish this. The negative world opinion created by the collateral loss of lives has just caused us to be disliked throughout the world negating any advantage we acquired by weakening Iraq. 6) We protected Israel. I believe this was one of the big unstated objectives of the Gulf War. Even is this was a goal, it doesn't appear Israel has become any safer in the last 10 years. In sum, we didn't seem to accomplish that much of lasting value to us or our allies and the backlash from that war seems to be one of the precipitating factors leading to our current war. I knowsome will argue that we would have had great accomplisments if we had just revmoved Sadam, but that is another post.
50,000 Gulf War vets gained mysterious symptoms from getting shot up with unproven vaccines. Is that what you mean?
Okay this thread has been here now for over 2 hours...and nobody has said, "wrong forum". So, I'll say it.
I think he meant to post it in the BBS hangout where glynch has posted numerous other discussions. He probably goofed and didn't realize it was in the rocket section.
Except for the fact that he his troops were already in some Saudi Arabian towns, and in fact some military intellegence guys got stuck in some Saudi Arabian town with a bunch of Iraqi troops and had to sneak out before the jets bombed them away. Wrong Forum anyways, sorry.
