Fuzzy dodges an intense barrage of flying "wellies".

World War II had nothing to do with liberating France, it was about securing French wine and cheese.

The Korean war wasn't about freeing South Korea, it was about ensuring the steady flow of cheap South Korean rice.

There were a lot of reasons to free Kuwait. Oil was certainly high up there. But to trivialize it as a grab for oil is to ignore history. You can always, if you look hard enough, a self interested reason for doing something.

wombat....you CANNOT be an Aussie....saying we chose our leader on 'personality'....good grief, Little Johnnie, [Cardigan Man], [Mister Sheen], call him what you will, is but a Dork.

Back when Clinton was doing new and interesting things with a cigar, Howard would probably have just smoked it...

wombat:

When I used the word 'jester' I was referring to Lecrayon, and his statements about the sniper that *you* seemed to offer justification for by listing assassinated leaders of my country.

I had a friend who was in the Gulf at the time of the Stark incident. I also seem to remember the USS Vincenes shooting down a Iranian airbus with 300 passengers a few years back. What sort of conspiracy could you attach to that? Did we want the scrap metal, or the jet fuel? Maybe they were really aliens...


everyone in general:

All I needed to know I learned on this messageboard
****************************************************

-I am not supposed to believe the press, and I am definately not supposed to believe the government, and that history is written by the oppressor, so it is false as well.

-We have been brainwashed by the US government, and that we subliminally yearn for the natural resources of every country on earth, and that is why we do *everything* that we do. Even your DIRT isn't safe.

-America has simultaneously butted into, and shirked our responsibility for, every major event in the last 240 years, and maybe even a couple before we existed.

- The Rules state that if you attack one bad guy, you have to attack them all, and if you do, you are bigoted because your idea of 'bad' is based on all that false information you shouldn't have believed in the first place.

-The only way to have any any integrity as a nation is to aspire to be nothing, since whatever you are aspiring to be won't *really* be what you are aspiring to be. Beyond that, you gripe a lot and do your best to know nothing at all, lest you be misled.

-When you finally have to go to war, you are evil. That said, make sure that everyone understands that they will never understand why it happened, and that only you will, and you will only educate them by disagreeing with everything they say. If they are good enough at binary mathmatics, they can divine all they need to know simply by adding all the 'false' answers.

This time I think I have built up the strength to avoid this insipid thread. I will consider it an awful, personal weakness if I fold and post again, anyway. I am gonna go and paint some lillies.

hobnailed Wellington boot. It's a sport, or martial art, or some such.

Believe NOTHING of what you hear, and only HALF of what you see.

Good luck on choosing the 'right' half.

And remember, it is better to be a pessimist than an optimist.

An optimist can always be disappointed, but a pessimist 'may' be pleasantly surprised...

Seriously though. When in doubt whether a war was caused by money or by ideology, most likely it was the former.

I had a history teacher in college who used to say that no war in history was EVER fought because of religion or ideology. Always for money and power. Include the infamous crusades to (ahem) "deliver" Jerusalem.
Some wars involved spices, some wars involved gold, some wars involved trading routes and sea ways, some wars involved oil. Or some wars just involved an infinite apetite for power and domination - which in the end also boils down to more money.

It's all nice and comforting to speak of ideology, to think we fight for freedom and democracy. But the sad thing is our leaders don't give a hoot about it unless it brings something back to them. In other words, our leaders are not some much worried about democracy in foreign countries as much as they are interested in free commerce, therefore opening a new markets to the McDonald's, Walmart and Microsofts of our World. Money talks again. Not ideals.

Of course, in front of the TV, in their Speech to the Nation, that is certainly not what they tell us. No they call the sensitive fibers in us. Our politicians try to convince us that we need to send our troops there because it is our responsibility to defend democracy and freedom in the World, and yada yada yada... Sorry Jack. Koweit is no more a democracy than Irak is. It's just richer. Would it really have been the same if Irak had invaded Jordan for example? Much more a democracy than Koweit, but unfortunatly very very poor. Of course not.

Wombat: very nice post. And I agree, no country deserves to be nuked. Except North Korea scares me. I wouldn't be surprised it tries to invade South Korea soon.

War.

It sounds kinda sad that it always boils down to economics and money. I think even with the best intentions it still come back to money. Freedom cost money, democracy cost money. Speading peace costs money. Sending soldiers in a country that needs to be 'freed' cost money. As a citizen, I have to admit I want most of my taxes to go back to infrastature and other needs of the country. I think I would be upset that Billions of dollars is going to another country when it is needed here. Also keep in mind that if a country unstablizes itself in order to be 'nice' to another country, it will find itself needing aid and the country it is trying to help will still need help.

This is why I say when it comes to human suffering and world issues it is always a tricky subject and not necessarily easy answers. By helping you could be hurting yourself and the people your trying to help (and maybe other if your not careful)

Now when it comes to money or economics it gets allot clearer. If a countries money is jepodized so is its people, armies, national security and any other country it is helping because it will no longer have the money to help.

If your country wanted to spend trillions of dollars to help another country that could not help in any way finacally would you vote for it knowing you would suffer in lack of resources (highway construction, food programs, health programs and anything else the goverment ran)?

Optimist: spends 90% of his time happy, 10% of his time being disappointed and devastated.

Pessimist: spends 98% of his time being miserable (along with everyone in his near vicinity), and 2% of his time being pleasantly surprised and happy.

I'm a devout pessimist and cynic, but I somtimes envy the optimists.

Politicians are monkeys - they do what we teach them to do. If we are so averse to confronting truth that a politician can only get elected by using lies, omission, evasion, and distotrtion, then the real blame should fall on us, and not on the organ grinder monkey who merely dances to our preferred tune.

fight the good fight, bkb...the rest of us (with a similar view to yours) are dwindling off since you can't change someone's beliefs without breaking a few eggs, and words never get close to being those eggs...

almost like convincing a republican to go democrat, or vice-versa...

I've been staying away from this thread because I think my views would be wildly unpopular and offensive to many. However... I wish the perspective on the Iraq question would focus more on the world we are creating and the world our children will inherit from us. To me the most important facts about Iraq are what it implies about America's leadership, their goals and the methods they are using to attain them.

Remember the original push for war with Iraq was an urgent and immediate need to invade, enforce a regime change and install an interim government run by the US. The justification for this was the imminent threat of an attack by Saddam using "weapons of mass destruction". The evidence of his threat was being proclaimed by Bush and Blair using various documents and recalling various events. The nuclear threat was stated by GW Bush as being a capability to produce a nuclear weapon within weeks and was supported by a paper from the AEC. The AEC has since denied that any such document exists. The CIA has said that there is not really any threat from Saddam unless we keep pushing him into a corner. The evidence of Saddam's cruelty and bad intentions, while all true, is referring to events that are all around twelve years old. So you have to ask yourself, why now? Why is it so important that we rush into a war, without UN or world support, to neutralize a threat when there is no hard, current evidence that the threat even exists?

The Bush administration's original resolution before the Congress was for unprecedented dictatorial powers over the military. Bush wanted the power to declare war against any country at any time with no oversight or debate. He wanted the power to use pre-emptive nuclear strikes, invasion with regime change to a US run government, assassination of world leaders, and all as a unilateral force acting outside of international treaties, and outside the scope of international law.

Maybe a lot of you didn't realize this. The resolution as passed by Congress was changed at least 4 times to include many specific controls over this power, limiting it to dealing with Saddam's regime. It still goes way too far in subverting the war powers and safeguards of the Constitution. If any of you got to watch the Congressional debate perhaps you noticed in the Senate there was an impassioned plea to consider this matter for more than the allowed 48 hours. The implications of the resolution are potentially earth-changing if a war is mounted that broadens into a regional or even a world-wide conflict. The potential for use of biological weapons, escalation into Israel - perhaps dragging the rest of the region into the war, the cost, the structure and costs of the new regime in Iraq, none of these issues were addressed by the administration. The only evidence used throughout the debate in favor of the war was the same horror stories used by the administration, all of which refer to events from 10 to 12 years ago. Evidence of new WOMD programs in Iraq were circumstantial, hearsay and disputed by everyone who had been a part of the previous weapons inspection teams. Even Madeline Albright and Henry Kissinger in an information gathering discussion a couple days before the debate began, agreed there was no evidence of an immediate threat to the US and said Saddam's military and weapons capabilities were probably less than thirty percent of what they were twelve years ago.

It made no sense at all until a document surfaced that was apparently a blueprint for this administration's intentions: http://www.sundayherald.com/27735 In this document we see the blueprint for Bush's decisions, many of which were seemingly so out of character for America. Like the US's refusal to participate in the ban on biological weapons. I was deeply offended that my country was the only one of 170 countries to wish to continue bio-warfare research and deployment when the only reason given was as Bush said before the conference "This treaty would have a negative impact on the bottom line of a few American companies and I can't allow that". In this blueprint for the "Pax Americana" empire we see they intend to actively pursue biologics as a useful tool - "advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool';"

The real point (aside from the frightening implications and the similarities to the "enabling act" that gave Hitler his power to invade Poland) is that the administration lies about the real reason for this war. The war is about oil and US control of the vast resources of the Middle-East. So was the war in Afghanistan. Did you know the war was already under way before September 11th? Many outside the US are aware of this and the State Department even has an explanation. They say that someone in Pakistan's ISI let the Taliban know we were attacking Afghanistan in the beginning of October so they got binLaden to make a pre-emptive strike against the US. That's the official US line to respond to the revelation that we were invading Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban due to their unwillingness to allow the Unocal pipeline project to continue. The timing of Sept 11th was uncanny coming the day after our invasion force had been deployed to the Middle-East and so conveniently giving the US unprecedented world support for the invasion and regime change. A frighteningly perfect coincidence (when were they planning to sell us on this war?).

All of this plus the recent Plan for Strategic Security or whatever it was called, the document of pre-emption, which states clearly and unambiguously that America will enforce its control over any country that attempts to produce an economy or a military that would be considered a challenge to America's superiority. It states that pre-emptive nuclear strike warfare will be considered acceptable in cases where the threat is considered to include WOMD. It also states that America will not recognize any international court and will not be subject to any prosecution for war crimes. It and the above mentioned document flatly state that America is embarking on a program of conquest and empire and intends to control the world.

And this is all justified and pursued with lies at the frontline of communication both with the American people and the rest of the world. In the I-Ching it warns that beginning an enterprise with a foundation of lies will result in disaster.