War Poll

[Gasometer]

So they found 11 shells in Iraq this morning they say.

Iraqi's say they are spent and ten years old.

North Korea is heading down the nuke arming path but there ain't any oil fields near that place.

I remember the night of S11 and turning on the tv. Within 2 minutes I thought someone is going to pay big time for this. They got rid of the Taliban and snuffed some AlQueda out, but where do we draw the line. Is Iraq a legitmate target?

War against a nation is easier to fight than the terrorists who are dispersed everywhere, are the Americans taking the easier option?

Is war an inevitability this year with Iraq?

gaso

 

[Pessimistic]

Gets more confusing every day. Yesterday the US said they would not be responsible for 'human shields' around targets.

So the US have targets ? Presumably they have some idea what they will be attacking (apart form Saddam himself) so why don't they let the weapons inspectors in on the info then they can go and see if the targets are legitimate ?

Why are there more questions than answers in this whole thing ?

 

[Sydneyfan]

The cynic in me reckons the US planned to go against Iraq not long after S11 and from that initial stage it would only be something catastrophic (another attack on US) or unforeseen that would stop them from eventually getting to Iraq.

North Korea have done a good job of stirring the pot whilst the US is preoccupied with Iraq. Regardless of what the UN decide, the US will attack and will only stop when they believe the job is completed to their satisfaction or when they are the only country left supporting a war on Iraq.

It's potentially risky for the US to go within UN approval (and/or approval of many Western nations) but it seems they are prepared to take this risk. The first strikes on Iraq may even occur before this month is out.

 

[Yianni]

Mate, if the US don't attack...there's no if, the US WILL attack.

There are about 100,000 troops there already. Like they're going to send them and then say "Oh OK then, come back"

What's the point of having the world's largest military if you've got noone to use it on?

 

[myee8]

Originally posted by Yianni
Mate, if the US don't attack...there's no if, the US WILL attack.

There are about 100,000 troops there already. Like they're going to send them and then say "Oh OK then, come back"

What's the point of having the world's largest military if you've got noone to use it on?

There's every chance that they will say come back. Say you are possibly preparing for an invasion of Iraq by waiting for UN approval. Now are you going to wait for the UN to say yes and then decide to move your troops into position or move them into position beforehand and wait? It means less time for the Iraqis to get their troops organised.

Oh and i am up for an invasion. Those bleeding heart peace activists always bleat about no war, peace, give diplomacy a chance, and that's it. They don't offer how to do that. You have ppl like Carmen Lawrence doing publicy stunts like planning to try to board the USS Abraham Lincon as a 'weapons inspector' for some peace group. Saddam is smart enough to play to the peace activists cause with his propaganda.

More to come, as tv calls. The District and The David Letterman Show is about to start!

 

[Mr Eagle]

The US will go, whether or not the UN backs it. Bush has staked too much on this confrontation - to back down in response to anything but a very large and public disarmament of Iraq's alleged stockpile of naughty goodies would destroy him politically and make the US the laughing stock of other nations.


(and yes, this is about politics and power. Don't be fooled otherwise.)

 

[myee8]

I was watching NBC news, and they interviewed Richard Butler, a former UN weapons inspector (and an Aussie?). Anyway he made the point that the Iraqis should look to overthrow Saddam, and this was apparently supported by a few neighbouring Arab states. Butler said that the Iraqi people should be thinking: Do we want the US invading our country? Regardless of who wins out of the US and Iraq, can we afford them to invade? This should then lead them to think that making Saddam step down is something to consider. Even as a pro-war person like me, i think it's a very viable option. The only obvious factor is whether Saddam will comply to this or just take it out on his citizens.

Originally posted by Mr Eagle
... (and yes, this is about politics and power. Don't be fooled otherwise.)

Don't forget the oil too. Iraq has quite a lot of oil wells, and to ignore them is just plain stupid.

 

[otaku]

however, i think u will find oil is of a secondary concern when it comes to this war...

the US has planned to attack Iraq for a long time, and it has more to do with international powerplays than oil

 

[Mr Eagle]

Originally posted by myee8
Don't forget the oil too. Iraq has quite a lot of oil wells, and to ignore them is just plain stupid.

I assumed oil was the only thing of any value there at all! I think Australia has enough sand for now, and there's really no market for camels...

 

[Bomber Spirit]

Any attempt at having weapons inspections or UN resolutions is a charade. The decision to go to war has already been made, and there's nothing Iraq can do to prevent it.

 

[Diego]

stolen from another forum... apparently printed in the london times last weekend... makes for a good read

Just replace some of the Blair bits with howard...



The United States of America has gone mad
John le Carré

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.
The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press.

The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden struck, but it was he who made it possible. Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the first place; Enron; its shameless favouring of the already-too-rich; its reckless disregard for the world’s poor, the ecology and a raft of unilaterally abrogated international treaties. They might also have to be telling us why they support Israel in its continuing disregard for UN resolutions.

But bin Laden conveniently swept all that under the carpet. The Bushies are riding high. Now 88 per cent of Americans want the war, we are told. The US defence budget has been raised by another $60 billion to around $360 billion. A splendid new generation of nuclear weapons is in the pipeline, so we can all breathe easy. Quite what war 88 per cent of Americans think they are supporting is a lot less clear. A war for how long, please? At what cost in American lives? At what cost to the American taxpayer’s pocket? At what cost — because most of those 88 per cent are thoroughly decent and humane people — in Iraqi lives?

How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America’s anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre. But the American public is not merely being misled. It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear. The carefully orchestrated neurosis should carry Bush and his fellow conspirators nicely into the next election.

Those who are not with Mr Bush are against him. Worse, they are with the enemy. Which is odd, because I’m dead against Bush, but I would love to see Saddam’s downfall — just not on Bush’s terms and not by his methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.

The religious cant that will send American troops into battle is perhaps the most sickening aspect of this surreal war-to-be. Bush has an arm-lock on God. And God has very particular political opinions. God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus of America’s Middle Eastern policy, and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist.

God also has pretty scary connections. In America, where all men are equal in His sight, if not in one another’s, the Bush family numbers one President, one ex-President, one ex-head of the CIA, the Governor of Florida and the ex-Governor of Texas.

Care for a few pointers? George W. Bush, 1978-84: senior executive, Arbusto Energy/Bush Exploration, an oil company; 1986-90: senior executive of the Harken oil company. **** Cheney, 1995-2000: chief executive of the Halliburton oil company. Condoleezza Rice, 1991-2000: senior executive with the Chevron oil company, which named an oil tanker after her. And so on. But none of these trifling associations affects the integrity of God’s work.

In 1993, while ex-President George Bush was visiting the ever-democratic Kingdom of Kuwait to receive thanks for liberating them, somebody tried to kill him. The CIA believes that “somebody” was Saddam. Hence Bush Jr’s cry: “That man tried to kill my Daddy.” But it’s still not personal, this war. It’s still necessary. It’s still God’s work. It’s still about bringing freedom and democracy to oppressed Iraqi people.

To be a member of the team you must also believe in Absolute Good and Absolute Evil, and Bush, with a lot of help from his friends, family and God, is there to tell us which is which. What Bush won’t tell us is the truth about why we’re going to war. What is at stake is not an Axis of Evil — but oil, money and people’s lives. Saddam’s misfortune is to sit on the second biggest oilfield in the world. Bush wants it, and who helps him get it will receive a piece of the cake. And who doesn’t, won’t.

If Saddam didn’t have the oil, he could torture his citizens to his heart’s content. Other leaders do it every day — think Saudi Arabia, think Pakistan, think Turkey, think Syria, think Egypt.

Baghdad represents no clear and present danger to its neighbours, and none to the US or Britain. Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, if he’s still got them, will be peanuts by comparison with the stuff Israel or America could hurl at him at five minutes’ notice. What is at stake is not an imminent military or terrorist threat, but the economic imperative of US growth. What is at stake is America’s need to demonstrate its military power to all of us — to Europe and Russia and China, and poor mad little North Korea, as well as the Middle East; to show who rules America at home, and who is to be ruled by America abroad.

The most charitable interpretation of Tony Blair’s part in all this is that he believed that, by riding the tiger, he could steer it. He can’t. Instead, he gave it a phoney legitimacy, and a smooth voice. Now I fear, the same tiger has him penned into a corner, and he can’t get out.

It is utterly laughable that, at a time when Blair has talked himself against the ropes, neither of Britain’s opposition leaders can lay a glove on him. But that’s Britain’s tragedy, as it is America’s: as our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way. Blair’s best chance of personal survival must be that, at the eleventh hour, world protest and an improbably emboldened UN will force Bush to put his gun back in his holster unfired. But what happens when the world’s greatest cowboy rides back into town without a tyrant’s head to wave at the boys?

Blair’s worst chance is that, with or without the UN, he will drag us into a war that, if the will to negotiate energetically had ever been there, could have been avoided; a war that has been no more democratically debated in Britain than it has in America or at the UN. By doing so, Blair will have set back our relations with Europe and the Middle East for decades to come. He will have helped to provoke unforeseeable retaliation, great domestic unrest, and regional chaos in the Middle East. Welcome to the party of the ethical foreign policy.

There is a middle way, but it’s a tough one: Bush dives in without UN approval and Blair stays on the bank. Goodbye to the special relationship.

I cringe when I hear my Prime Minister lend his head prefect’s sophistries to this colonialist adventure. His very real anxieties about terror are shared by all sane men. What he can’t explain is how he reconciles a global assault on al-Qaeda with a territorial assault on Iraq. We are in this war, if it takes place, to secure the fig leaf of our special relationship, to grab our share of the oil pot, and because, after all the public hand-holding in Washington and Camp David, Blair has to show up at the altar.

“But will we win, Daddy?”

“Of course, child. It will all be over while you’re still in bed.”

“Why?”

“Because otherwise Mr Bush’s voters will get terribly impatient and may decide not to vote for him.”

“But will people be killed, Daddy?”

“Nobody you know, darling. Just foreign people.”

“Can I watch it on television?”

“Only if Mr Bush says you can.”

“And afterwards, will everything be normal again? Nobody will do anything horrid any more?”

“Hush child, and go to sleep.”

Last Friday a friend of mine in California drove to his local supermarket with a sticker on his car saying: “Peace is also Patriotic”. It was gone by the time he’d finished shopping.

 

[Yianni]

Just about says it all really

 

[Pessimistic]

Does anyone know what Bush Snr thinks ?