Thirteen crucial milestones on the road to democracy in Iraq

Posted by Abe Foxman's cousin on December 31, 2006, 05:16 PM | #

Check this out. Daily life in “liberated” Iraq. Also notice how the footage we see (especially here in the US) is heavily sanitised.

Here are also some inconvenient facts that people do not know:

CIA-Saddam co-operation goes back to the early 1960s through all the chaos of one military coup after another. It wasn’t until Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait and the decline of the USSR towards the end of the 1980s that co-operation stopped completely.

Israel sold chemical weapons to Iran AND Iraq in 1980. Recently declassified state department documents reveal this.

The US sold chemical weapons technology to Saddam’s government in 1983 to help him fight the war with Iran. 

The US practically invited Saddam to invade Kuwait in 1990. US ambassdaor to Iraq in 1990 met Saddam a short while before the invasion of Kuwait and assured him that the US would have no say in a “border dispute” between Kuwait and Iraq.

The US is currently building 14 permanent military bases in Iraq. America will never retreat from Iraq because is was never the intention to retreat. 

Last interesting factoid: the Germans wanted oil and were trying to build a railroad track between Baghdad and Constantinople in 1914. Had this been built, the Germans would have been able to ship oil recently discovered in Iraq (in 1910) all the way to Berlin s there already was a railroad track functioning between Berlin and Constantinople. This would have had an enormous impact in tilting the balance of power in Europe and would have made Germany a lot stronger than Britain and France. As a result, the second contingent of British soldiers to be dispatched in WWI was sent to BASRA! (although no one ever even hears about this)

There will never be an end to this as long as Israeli security and oil reserves demand a permanent military presence in the Middle East. If anything, military involvement will only increase.

Posted by onetwothree on December 31, 2006, 06:37 PM | #

Shameful as it is, as long as we can more-or-less control the Iraqi oil (or even, prevent others from controlling it) no further milestones are needed. The job really is done, and everything else is just the cost of empire.

Posted by Alex Zeka on January 01, 2007, 09:43 AM | #

123, It is much more economical (in terms of money alone, never mind the lives lost) to obtain oil by striking an accomodation with a dictator, than through invasion and the consequent looting and carnage. Most oil companies, which didn’t even have to pay a penny for the war, were fairly Arabist in outlook: and with good reason, given that the availability of oil has collapsed since the start of the war.

Construction companies like Halliburton were the real shills for war, and they were doing it for strictly ‘broken window’ reasons (cf. Bastiat).

Posted by Abe Foxman's cousin on January 01, 2007, 11:15 AM | #

Between [url=rtsp://indybay.org/uploads/beyond_iraq.rm
]Iraq and a hard place[/url].

Frickin hilarious.

It is much more economical (in terms of money alone, never mind the lives lost) to obtain oil by striking an accomodation with a dictator, than through invasion and the consequent looting and carnage. Most oil companies, which didn’t even have to pay a penny for the war, were fairly Arabist in outlook: and with good reason, given that the availability of oil has collapsed since the start of the war.

But Saddam wasn’t an ordinary dictator. He was much more ambitious and very unpredictable. Also, the US couldn’t have cut a deal with Saddam after Gulf War I and the sanctions. That would have made Americans eat humble pie. And we couldn’t have kept the sanctions going because that was becoming unacceptable to a lot of people with the death of a million Iraqi children in less than ten years. So if the sanctions were going to go, Saddam also had to go. And if there was any chance of letting Saddam off the hook, the Israelis and the Neoconservatives weren’t going to have any of it.

This war had been on the table for more than ten years. I am surprised that the political class and the business elite waited this long to carry it out.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on January 01, 2007, 11:43 AM | #

“Check this out. Daily life in ‘liberated’ Iraq.”  (—Abe Foxman’s cousin)

I watched a little more than a quarter of the video, then couldn’t stomach more. 

I don’t see how the conclusion can be avoided, taking everything he’s done into account (not just Iraq), that President Bush is the most evil man in the history of the world.

Posted by Rnl on January 01, 2007, 02:56 PM | #

The US practically invited Saddam to invade Kuwait in 1990. US ambassdaor to Iraq in 1990 met Saddam a short while before the invasion of Kuwait and assured him that the US would have no say in a ‘border dispute” between Kuwait and Iraq.

This is misleading. Hosni Mubarak, who was attempting to mediate the Iraq-Kuwait crisis, personally assured President Bush that the threat of invasion was only a negotiating device to force more concessions from the Kuwaitis. That’s what Saddam had told him during their private conversation in Baghdad. Bush Sr. treated Mubarak’s assurance as an accurate indication of Saddam’s intentions. No firm declaration of U.S. opposition to an Iraqi invasion was forthcoming, because most in the White House were confident hat no invasion was imminent. The intelligence community had a different opinion.

It is unlikely that there was any secret green light, as opponents of the first Gulf War often allege. The worst one can say is that Ambassador Glaspie may have hinted, in her meeting with Saddam and Tariq Aziz, that Bush would not object to some minor theft of Kuwaiti territory. But the official story, which (for what it’s worth) I believe is correct, is that Saddam stupidly misunderstood her. She, like the President, was convinced there would be no invasion, so she didn’t properly warn Saddam of the possible repercussions. She was dealing with a dispute between two friendly countries, and she expressed the diplomatic view that the U.S. did not take one side over the other. She only repeated the standard line that the dispute should be settled peacefully. That was a mistake, but an honest mistake. As Glaspie later said, she didn’t realize that Saddam was stupid.

Posted by Abe Foxman's cousin on January 01, 2007, 03:10 PM | #

Glaspie must’ve been very naive. Saddam had told her quite honestly that Iraq was on the brink of going bankrupt and the Kuwaitis were making life harder by pumping oil at an even faster rate than usual to break the back of the Iraqis. Oil prices had plummeted. In this situation, what did Glaspie expect the Iraqis would do? May be Saddam wasn’t the only one who was stupid.

Posted by Rnl on January 02, 2007, 12:38 AM | #

what did Glaspie expect the Iraqis would do?

Negotiate peacefully, which is what they should have done.

Kuwait was under no obligation to capitulate to Iraqi demands. Saddam wanted them to write off billions in debt. They refused, which is a creditor’s prerogative. Iraq wanted a revision of Kuwait’s borders. Kuwait refused, which is a sovereign state’s prerogative.

Kuwait denies that it was exceeding OPEC production quotas, but almost everyone assumes it was. That doesn’t, however, justify invasion. The oil was, after all, Kuwait’s property, not Saddam’s.

Posted by Rnl on January 02, 2007, 12:45 AM | #

This war had been on the table for more than ten years. I am surprised that the political class and the business elite waited this long to carry it out.

Advocates of traditional foreign policy, represented by men like Baker and Scowcroft, opposed the invasion. They didn’t want Saddam externally deposed. That’s why they didn’t depose him at the end of the Gulf War. They understood that occupying a country is much different from defeating it. They understood that a multicultural state like Iraq could easily fragment in the absence of authoritarian government. They understood also that regional stability and American interests were, as Scowcroft has stated, best assured by a strong Iraq balancing a strong Iran. They liked that balance. They didn’t want to destroy it. The Iraq war was not on _their_ table for ten years.

The terrible disaster of this monstrous invasion had nothing to do with traditional (“realist”) foreign policy.

Posted by Sid the Sexist. on January 02, 2007, 09:01 AM | #

Talking of April Glaspie (largely long-forgotten as her meagre talents richly deserve - ‘affirmative action’ strikes again), surely she must rank at the top of the list of the most destructive ‘woman in politics award’ beating such firece competition as Indira Gandhi, Mrs Bandranaike and Margaret Thatcher?
I could never understand the wisdom of making a woman ambassador to an Arab nation.

Posted by ben tillman on January 02, 2007, 10:03 AM | #

“Kuwait denies that it was exceeding OPEC production quotas, but almost everyone assumes it was. That doesn’t, however, justify invasion. The oil was, after all, Kuwait’s property, not Saddam’s.”

I thought Kuwait was slant-drilling across the border.  No?

Posted by Rnl on January 02, 2007, 03:03 PM | #

I thought Kuwait was slant-drilling across the border. No?

The Iraqis said so. Kuwait denied the charge. In any case the oil was beneath disputed territory. Saddam didn’t think any of it belonged to Kuwait, even though the Rumaila oil field straddled the border. And he didn’t only take disputed territory. He took everything.

The mere existence of Iraqi complaints didn’t justify an invasion. Opponents of the Gulf War often assume that by listing Iraqi complaints they’re proving that Saddam should have been permitted to occupy and annex his neighbor. It’s hard to take that brand of reasoning seriously.

Iraq’s complaints are not secret information withheld from the public. They were known at the time and they were publicized at the time. They didn’t then and they don’t now justify the invasion of Kuwait.

*** 

Iraqi and Kuwaiti emissaries held talks in Jedda, Saudi Arabia on July 31 and August 1, but the talks collapsed when Kuwait refused to write off billions of dollars of Iraqi war debts and relinquish the islands of Bubiyan and al-Warba.

http://www.mmun.org/documents/2007/topic_guides/2007_hsc_a.pdf

The ownership of these islands was not even contested. They belonged to Kuwait. Saddam wanted them. The fact that he wanted them didn’t oblige the Kuwaitis to let him have them.   

***

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people4/Wilson/wilson-con3.html

Joseph Wilson Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

[...]

Q. In your book [The Politics of Truth], you discuss two very important meetings, and I would like to talk to you about those. One is the meeting of Ambassador Glaspie with Saddam Hussein, and the history books have not been clear yet about whether she gave him the wrong signal before the invasion that led him to think that he would get away with it, and that we would acquiesce in the invasion. You’re providing new information here, things that you have learned since that day from people on the Iraq side who were present. Tell us about that.

A. The first draft of the history of that meeting has not been very kind to April Glaspie, and has, in fact, suggested that perhaps by the way that she phrased her talking points, she may have inadvertently given Saddam Hussein a green light, or at least not a red light, for invading Kuwait—either encouraging or at least not discouraging it.

Well, having spoken to one of the people who was at the meeting from the Iraqi side in New York last year, about two months before he passed away, I asked that very question, because I was not at the meeting. I know what April told me when she came out of the meeting, and I know how the cables she wrote read. He said, “No, absolutely not”—that in fact, in that meeting what she said was exactly what the Iraqis expected her to say. It was a longstanding policy of the United States and of other global powers or regional powers that we do not take positions on the merits of a particular legal case between two Arab countries, other than to encourage them in the strongest possible terms to mediate their differences either through an internal court of justice or international mediation or bilateral diplomacy.

What did surprise this interlocutor, Nizar Hamdun, who had served as ambassador to Washington and as ambassador to the United Nations, as well as undersecretary for foreign affairs in Iraq, what had surprised him was the tenor of the letter subsequently sent to Saddam Hussein by then-President Bush.

Q. Before the invasion?

A. Before the invasion—which he found to be overly conciliatory. Now, in reporting that, I did not intend to be critical of what the administration did; it is simply a matter of putting it down for history’s sake. At that time, we were being advised by neighboring countries not to do anything provocative, anything that Saddam might take as an excuse to invade Kuwait. So we were walking on eggshells.

I can understand in retrospect, as I understood at the time, the need to be conciliatory; but it was important to put down for the history books how this was perceived from the Iraqi perspective.

[...]

Q. We were somewhat surprised by his move against Kuwait, even though the embassy knew and was reporting all of the constraints that were on him in terms of reeling still from the Iran-Iraq War, the enormous debt he had, the breakdown in negotiations with the Kuwaitis over access to a port there.

A. Right. There were a number of issues: One, the Iraqis wanted all the debt forgiven and additional credits to be advanced. The argument that they made was that they had spilled the blood of their sons to defend the Arab world against the Persian hordes. Two, they wanted Kuwait to stop slant-drilling—drilling Iraqi oil underneath disputed territory. Three, they wanted to be able to secure their access to the Persian Gulf by controlling islands which were technically in Kuwait, but which were uninhabited, and they wanted to make a land swap, which the Kuwaitis didn’t want to do. So all that played into it, and then there were some border disputes along the border between the two countries.

Saddam himself had told April Glaspie, and told President Mubarak (he took a phone call from him while April Glaspie was sitting in the meeting); he said to both of them, “I assure you that I am not going to invade Kuwait as long as there is a negotiating process ongoing.”

We saw the troops massing. We watched it all. There was some question in Washington as to whether or not he was bluffing. There were two or three in the analytical community who predicted that he was going to invade; they have been dining out on the correctness of that prediction ever since. The rest of the analytical community, by and large, was conflicted. They looked at a number of indicators to assess whether what the military was doing was defensive or offensive in nature. It wasn’t until about eighteen hours before the invasion that the fourth of those five indicators went positive.

Posted by Abe Foxman's cousin on January 02, 2007, 03:43 PM | #

Negotiate peacefully, which is what they should have done.

Kuwait denies that it was exceeding OPEC production quotas, but almost everyone assumes it was. That doesn’t, however, justify invasion. The oil was, after all, Kuwait’s property, not Saddam’s.

Now you are thinking like an American and not like Saddam. Saddam wasn’t a man raised to respect “American values” - property rights, sovereignty of independent nations etc. He had no qualms about using poison gas, killing vast numbers of so-called “conspirators” within the Baath party, appropriating whatever he liked within Iraq etc. I think this example shows that many Americans were very naive about Saddam until the invasion of Kuwait and his brutal suppression of the rebellion of his own people in 1991 - right after the first Gulf War.

But most importantly, he was in a desperate situation economically. The economy was in ruins after the war with Iran and he needed funds desperately. Invading Kuwait would have been a no-brianer if he got the impression that America would do nothing. And that is exactly the impression he got from Glaspie.

Posted by Desmond Jones on January 02, 2007, 04:28 PM | #

The video of Saddam’s hanging is interesting.

http://pandachute.com/videos/leaked_saddam_being_hung_video

Allegedly, the Iraqis use the short drop method.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20061227/cm_huffpost/037213

Yet, if you watch the video clearly Saddam drops below the platform. The standard drop method leaves the executed’s head just at the hinge of the trap door.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Execution_Lincoln_assassins.jpg

Clearly Saddam dropped below the platform which suggests a longer fall. In most cases, it appears, the noose knot will remain at or behind the left ear. However, at the end of the Saddam hanging video, the knot appears to be under his chin.

Weird. [No conspiracy theory implied] 

Posted by Englander on January 02, 2007, 04:53 PM | #

The drop can vary depending on the weight of the person being executed.  Too short and the neck doesn’t break; too long and decapitation can occur.

Posted by allotmentkeeper on January 02, 2007, 11:43 PM | #

Guessedworker,

My prior request is revived by your own most recent (movie review) blog - Please can we have more posts that connect with the EnglishmanInTheStreet?

If any one of the fellas above had turned the discussion to how it applied to me and mine I know the thread would have served at least some purpose - but pretending to “talk shop”, about interests which ultimately and clearly concern none of the participants are soon forgotten even by those present. As internet activists we all know this don’t we? We all regret that waste of time.

>You made, I think, a false distinction between ideas/Iq and audience in response to my last request for topicality, your recent blog suggests a recognition of that.

I see no such difficulty. Having shared my copies of Steadfast, and lots of print-offs from Yggdrasil’s website, Jared Taylor’s, Rienzi’s, James Bowery’s, and plenty of MR’s stuff with people from all walks of life and at all intelligent levels - and so helped remind them of old truths - I know that even the most unorthodox or scientific argument will make sense if presented credibly and honestly.

In fact I found that among the ‘poorer classes’, that that which we consider the most ‘politically incorrect’ is often considered a given. The people you think can’t handle your stuff are actually the people who already KNOW your stuff. Perhaps the first and easiest job is to give THEM a political voice.

Posted by Matt O'Halloran on January 03, 2007, 07:12 AM | #

Allotmentkeeper is right that we should strive to demonstrate, over the din of multiculti propaganda, the true implications and costs to our people of transnational greed and treachery. But in important ways, and in the teeth of the mindbenders, our people are doing the work for themselves. This is one of the most heartening aspects of the new millennium in UK politics, and a main reason why I am more cheerful than most of you.

The remarkable thing about the Iraq Attaq is that *before* it happened—and despite complaisant coverage of the build-up from a British MSM still half in love with Blair and NuLab—millions of ‘ordinary people’ had already decided it was a wicked folly. Like AJP Taylor’s ‘troublemakers’ defying imperialism in past epochs, they refused to be conscripted into a globalising crusade.

I met some of them on that memorable day in Hyde Park in February 2003. As a veteran observer of London protests going back to the 1960s, I was fascinated by the representativeness of this crowd- far older, more Middle English and familial than the usual bunches of rentamob students and foreign axe-grinding exiles. Baby Boomers who did not kick over any traces when young had become turning worms.

Those plain folk were appalled by war in Iraq, not because they thought we would lose or take a mauling in winning; after the First Gulf War, few could have had any delusons about Iraqi soldiers’ loyalty to Saddam or his synthetic nation. No, these Britons were angry and apprehensive because they pitied Iraqis who had been racked by sanctions for ten years, and because they thought the war was unjustified: wrong target, wrong time, somersaulting UNO procedures, Britain as Bush’s poodle, Pandora’s Box to be wrenched open in the ME, etc.

And they were right. Blair and Co. were wrong. Quicker than usual, history has given the verdict. No revisionist will ever contrive to make 2003 smell sweet, any more than Suez has been deodorised.

Phoney evidence was invoked to justify the invasion. The leaders may have deceived themselves before attempting to deceive others, as the best conmen do. Doesn’t matter. They misjudged just about everything except the outcome of the firefight, and they proceeded to ignore the maxim that a country which goes to war internally divided is risking too much.

They committed, and have since compounded for nearly four years, the worst voluntary blunder in foreign policy in our modern history. Its implications, which have only begun to unfold, make Suez look like an ephemeral gaffe—though the mindset which produced Eden’s Folly should have been a warning to Blair, if that shallow fellow had any feeling for history.

What a substantial minority of Britons felt and expressed back in February 2003 has become the almost universal conensus beyond the Blair bunker. It is hard to think of another prolonged UK military action so totally repudiated by the citizenry. One pities the fighting men who will return to Civvy Street without a cheer, like Vietnam vets.

Disillusionment with the propsect of a Cameron/Brown axis that wants to keep this foolishness going indefinitely in obeisance to Bush has deepened the general disgust with careerist politics. Party memberships dwindle and elections are perceived as a choice of near-identical evils. Iraq has degraded civic life in the United Kingdom.

What patriotic activists should now do is to connect the dots, and argue that the immigration floodtide, the curse of the ‘special relationship’, the plague of PC and the coming insolvency crisis in millions of ordinary homes are not discrete failures of incompetent rulers, but elements of a concerted attack on the freedom of the nation to givern itself, and the freedom of Her Majesty’s subjects to live peaceably among themselves and in the world. Shall we be cowed, silenced, shamed slaves of the New World Order, or an island once again?

The lunacy in Iraq is a continuous provocation to decency and common sense. It could be the blue touch paper for the incandescence of popular anger against the whole liberal-globalist package.

Posted by Eddy Morrison on January 03, 2007, 09:28 PM | #

BUSH’S BIGGEST MISTAKE

Eddy Morrison

The half-insane George W. Bush is leaping about in ecstasy that Saddam
Hussein has been murdered.  Whatever we think about another sovereign nation,
men who invade it and, then, hunt down and hang its leader are war-criminals.
Now, every Sunni in the world—there are 1,126,325,000 of them— will feel
that they have a right and duty to avenge Saddam’s illegal-death. Their
money and support will go to international insurgent groups.

All who connived in Saddam’s death will bear the full brunt of the repercussions
from an outraged world.  Nationalists, however, are not blinding ourselves in
an anti-Islamic campaign, supporting the State of Israel or applauding acts
of aggression against the Palestinians.  Yet, Bush has created an Islamic martyr
in murdering Saddam.  Bush’s biggest mistake.  A mistake the rest of us will
pay for in an upsurge of world retaliation and reprisal.

We are not pro-Moslem.  We are against Moslem-fundamentalism and will
repatriate all non-whites, legally, when we come to power, thereby solving the
Moslem-problem on our shores.  However, Iraq was a sovereign nation, which
was and is of no concern to us.  No interests of our country were or are threatened
by Iraq.  The invasion of Iraq and the continuing loss of lives is illegal.  Bush,
attacking a sovereign nation, is a war-criminal.

Our nation should only be involved in wars which affect our own interests.  The
attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan and, then, on Lebanon and Iran only serve the
interests of Israel.  Bush, the real war-criminal, is being used simply to further
the cause of world-Zionism.  The whole Saddam “trial” has been a farce, without
legal-standing.  The murdered Saddam has become, consequently, a martyr for
his just-cause and wronged-people.

http://www.skinheadz.com/news/articles/2006/123001.html
© 2006 Skinheadz