I am very curious as to your beliefs regarding our foreign policy. I have read your posts, but if I could ask you to tell me how you truly feel we should handle Iraq. Please don't think I'm flamebaiting. I am truly curious. I may have some questions to ask you after you reply if you choose to reply, but I am not trying to be confrontational.
God, I thought no one would ever ask. We can't change the past so our misguided Gulf War I can't be changed. Too bad we could have avoided a lot of trouble and blowback, including 9/11. Bin Laden and his gang should be hunted down relentlessly and tried in an international court, if they don't go down fighting. Can't put up with that bull****. Doing this with scrupulous fairness could make even the Arabs respect and perhaps even like us rather than further hate us. As has been often noted friendly relations with muslim govrnments increases our ability to hunt down these terrorists. Sadam does hate us. He has good reason as we've tried to kill him. Then we tried to starve his people into rising up and killing him for us. Before they somewhat acquiesced to him despite his brutality because he provided the most modern health care, educational, cultural and other opportunities of any large Arab country. It is probably too late to make him our friend and ally like he was before. Sadam and Iraq and the larger problem of Arab hatred and hatred us can't be solved in a vacuum. Invading him will only help with one indvidual Sadam. As the CIA has said the war will create more terrorists. We need a crash course in independence from oil and to change our misguided policy toward Israel. WE need to remove our troops from all the Arab countires. These three misguided policies make it impossible to deal with the whole Arab world in a normal non-exploitive productive fashion. Since we're not willing any longer to shed lives for their oil we can remove the troops. I dont believe for one moment that we love Arab democracy or even lives so much that we're there for those reasopns. Sadam's weapons are not a big deal. The UN inspectors said no nukes and his bio/chemical weapons which they said he could still have are virtually useless against us unless we put people next to them as Bush is planning to do. This is why most of the world either opposes our war or has either had to have been bribed or , threatened to begrudgingly support us, oftentimes against a majority of their citizens. If you would follow the UN and world opinion and force Israel to behave we could start to mend fences with the Arab World. Anything else is a fantasy no matter how many Gulf Wars you have. The sanctions should be removed against Iraq. No need to kill Iraqis needlessly just to try to get rid of Sadam. Virtually the whole rest of the security council and the UN wanted to do this, but we blocked them. This was a year or two prior to 9/11 and our phony attempt to justify war on Iraq due to 9/11. Once the Israel irritation has been cleared up and we have stopped the murderous UN sanctions, and removed ur troops tensions will start to diminish between us and the Arabs. After all we had many years of good relations in the past and they certainly want to do oil deals with us. This was all done without our troops being there. Arabs love Americans as individuals and like the idea of our freedom. they just hate Once we remove the main problems and things moderate a bit we will tend to see the exteme Muslim fanaticism of some Arabs diminish. You can never oppress someone into religious moderation. Or if you can it requires total occupation, intermarrigage and many generatrions. WE should stop selling arms immediately to all of the countries of the Middle East. Let Israel bankrupt itself if it wants as its weapons decay. Same with the Arabs. Try to encourage our allies not to sell them weapons either. If we want to pressure our allies into doing things they don't want this would be a worthwile example. We can start to actually assist the develop of democracy in the Arab World. Before we have always thwarted it as we preferred to deal with beholden emirs, Kings or other puppets, provided we could get good prices on their oil. In this spirit we should remove the troops from Saudi and if the people want to overhtrow the king so be it. We might pressure our old friends the Kuwaitis to hold elections and even allow women some rights. Would Sadam develop weapons, probably. As the CIA said at one point he needs them for prestige . If nothing else, as we are proving now, he needs them to feel safe from invasions. We could attempt to bribe him not to do so, but if that didn't work we could always threaten him with total annihilation if he used one.. It worked before. No one has ever given a good reason why it wouldn't work again. Such steps would do much to eliminate terrorist threats to the US. Given the hundreds of billions that our Gulf Wars cost. We could even speed things up with a Marshall Plan to develop the educational and other infrastructures of these countries. They would greatly appreciate it, but not if the price is a puppet government, a US military leader or an agreement to allow Israel to flaunt UN Rsolutions and the opinion of the whole world.
There is absolutely no way you would want a monster like that to be your friend. That logic is very flawed.
excellent ideas, glynch, i wish u are the us president! when u have no more troops in the middle east , what's bin laden excuse then, he n his gang properly stop what they are doing too and if u keep trading with iraqis instead of sanction againist them the iraqis will only get better life include saddam that way they will not want war no more and they will be againist saddam if saddam try to do anything crazy that will ruin their better life! trying to tell the whole world with hyprocrite lies like u going to war for the arab's freedom n all the other bull**** will not win u any support cuz peoples of the world are not stupid ! i believe peoples can do the same things with the same good result but its the motive that behind them that matter, that is why i dunt support american taking out saddam! for example both person can give one dollar to a poor but one did it becuz he wanted to look good but the other did it becuz he really true heart to help the poor out. i wouldnt say n support the guy who did it to look good is good becuz even tho the guy still get one dollar but it the motive behind it that i am againist!
Glynch I am sorry but you have no idea what you are talking about. I grew up in Saudi Arabia and if the Americans had not have come to the aid of the Kuwaitis in The GW then the Iraqis would have continued on into Saudi and probably killed me and raped my mom before killing her and the rest of my family along with the other 15000 American civilians living in Saudi Arabia. And don't give me some crap about how there shouldn't be any Americans in Saudi Arabia, there are well over 15,000 Arabs in America. Saddam Hussein is a madman, we were allies with him when he was fighting another madman, the ayatola in Iran. No one knew then that he would turn out to be this big of a mad man. It is not America's fault what is happening right now and we should not act like it is. This is a case of a mad man trying to glorify himself (SH) and a mad man trying to reverse the modernization of his people (OBL). Believe me most arabs do not hate Americans, if that was the case then my parents, who still live in Saudi, would get lynched on the street. Instead, and what you don't see on the news, is after 9/11 almost all the Saudis my parents knew apologized for what happened. Just like it is white supremacists who hate blacks, and not whites, it is not arabs who hate americans. It is Islamic Fundamentalists.
Legrouper, I can appreciate that you feel that you have special insight into the situation. Let's face it in some ways you should in a certain cultural way. I also appreciate your concern for your parents. As has been shown the US falsified evidence that Iraq was threatening Saudi before the First Gulf War. Do you have any evidence whatsover of your assertion that Iraq was going to take over Saudi Arabia? Blanket assertions from Bush I and his supporters don't count, given the fact that he has been proven to not ony have lied but to gone to an elaborate scheme of flase satellite photos to buttress his claim. Perhaps that is why you heard that story while in Saudi. .And don't give me some crap about how there shouldn't be any Americans in Saudi Arabia, there are well over 15,000 Arabs in America. I'm all in favor of Americans in Saudi, my sister and brother in law spent about 5 years there. I was talking about our troops being there. My brother in law, who was a contract worker with the Saudi Army, says our troops are there to keep the King in power and protect him from his own people. One thing we do agree on --Arabs don't hate Americans. They do, however, hate American foreign policy toward the Middle East. You say Sadam Hussein is a madman? I agree to a certain point. However, Bush II and gang then go on to say that therefore, even though he has shown restraint in the face of Aemrican power before, since he is totally crazy, he will kill us all with fiendish weapons, even if we threaten to nuke his whole country to a nuclear wasteland is just a scare tactic. This is designed to cause the Americans to back Bush's plan to dominate the world, win elections, feed his delusions of being a great Churchillian figure, control the Arab oil fields, support Sharon and his other reasons for the war.
you really don't see the danger of him turning over WMD to a terrorist group...any terrorist group..to be unleashed?
Kafji, glynch. Remember that little incursion into Saudi? The Iraqis didn't cross the border to have tea with the Saudis... And if the buildup didn't really happen, and was just a pack of falsified images, then how is it that the entire friggen Iraqi army was sitting just over the border when we entered Iraq/Kuwait? That is one of your more ridiculous conspiracy theories, especially since it is flatly contradicted by historical fact. Why you persist in blatantly altering reality to fit your conspiracy theories mystifies me. Aside from that little tidbit, which I just had to clear up. carry on. This thread amuses me.
I disagree, lots of Arabs hate Americans. Not all of them, but certainly many in the Palestinian areas and Saudi Arabia have a lot of hatred. Hence the chearing on 9/11. Butnot all of them, they don't seem to hate us in India, Iran, or Iraq.
I'm not sure if I've ever read a more hypocritical and downright delusional post. You continue to blame the UN sanctions (and the US in turn) for starving the Iraqi people, which is incomprehensible. Iraq, as a country, receives a ton of food/money in exchange for oil under the terms of the sanctions. Do you know what happens to them? Your hero Saddam steals it all for his own purposes. He is constantly spending money like water on mansions, weapons. How the US is to blame for Saddam's thievery is beyond the scope of my understanding, but I'm sure you have a great answer to defend your buddy. What I got from your post is that you trust our government less than that of any other country, including our allies and the Iraqi dictator. You are also stating that Iraq is harmless, even if Saddam gets his hands on WMD. How can you come to that conclusion? Your suggestion of waiting until Saddam nukes someone to respond is also laughable. What if it is America who he decides to test his newly unfettered weapons development on? Here is where you get hypocritical. You suggest that we lean on our allies to pressure them into our viewpoint and bribe Saddam not to develop WMD. These are American practices that you bemoaned in this very same post. But the tactics are perfectly acceptable as long as they agree with your personal platform. You also once again display your ever-present trust in Saddam by assuming he would comply to any deal we made with him. He hasn't complied with any of the post-Gulf War sanctions, so why do you think he would do so with an under the table agreement we make with him?
Exactly. He didn't like those tactics when they were used during the Cold War because he doesn't believe the fight against communism was necessary. But if we could use those tactics in support of his ideology then it doesn't even occur to him that it could be wrong, even though his whole basis of criticizing the US is the use of these very tactics over the past century.
Glynch, History has proven your theories to be flawed. We did nothing while Hitler ran wild in Europe, we tried to contain him. When Hirohito invaded Manchuria and China and most of Asia, we did and attempted to contain him. When Bin Laden bombed the USS Cole and two US Embassies, we did relatively nothing. History has shown that we have paid for these tactics with our dearest blood. You cannot reason with a Dictator like Saddam, or even Kim Jong Il for that matter. Containment will not work in this case. It would only take 1 bomb, 1 tiny bomb to level one of our biggest cities and create mass-casualties like you could never imagine. I would hate to be watching CNN or FoxNews 2 years from now as they are showing footage of the mushroom cloud over NYC and saying..."Oh gee, we should have done something about Saddam two years ago, but we tried containment." I don't know how we would be able to anwer the call to our time and place in history if we did nothing.
Madmax: you really don't see the danger of him turning over WMD to a terrorist group...any terrorist group..to be unleashed? Max, while this is certainly a possibility and Bush II has raised this often in attempt to scare people to support his war I believe the less politically motivated testimony via letter of CIA Director to congress. cia
Treeman, I like to argue with facts -- not argue how I am personally always invincibly strong and right that you are weak and wrong, the type of boasts you are prone to. Prove the Iraqis were massed on the border planning to attack Saudi before we attacked them. A border incursion after we attacked them and the Saudis fought with the US is not the same thing at all if that is what you are hinting at. Iraq shot missiles at Israel after we started the war. It would be sort of ridiculous to claim our main purpose to start Gulf War I was because Iraq was attacking Israel when the attack started after we started the war with Iraq
Glynch - I believe Iraq started the war when they invated Kuwait, and rampaged that country. Or do you doubt that happened too because none of us were there?
This was also in the CIA letter that glynch links to: ------------------------- "Tenet did, however, leave the Bush conspiracists something to cling to. In his letter to Graham, he played up the alleged links between al-Qaeda and Iraq, saying: 'We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade. Credible information indicates that Iraq and al-Qaeda have discussed safe haven and reciprocal non-aggression ... we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al-Qaeda members ... we have credible reporting that al-Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq, who could help them acquire WMD capabilities ... Iraq has provided training to al-Qaeda members in areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.'" ------------------------- If we are to believe Tenet's assertion that Hussein would only use WMD against the U.S. if he is 'backed into a corner', then we must also believe Tenet's assertion that Iraq has aided Al-Qaeda in the past and has been asked for help in acquiring WMD.
I don't why you guys believe this. How about you legrouper? I'm not sure why it is easier for some to believe that there is the insane racial? hatred of Americans by Arabs or Palestinians with a few exception? ( There is always a "good one" or "one of my best friends is Arab") The fact of the matter if someone oppresses you regardless of the race or religion of you or your oppressor you hate their actions. We did nothing while Hitler ran wild in Europe, we tried to contain him It gets pretty old that whenever anyone wants to start a war and not neotiate that they trot this out. You know every international conflict is not Hitler all over again. Does anyone know if we used the Hitler things to justify Vietnam, Grenada, Panama or any of our othr recent wars?
