Exactly the point. Lack of democracy in Middle East politics is CAUSE not symptom.
[quote=“Uncle Sam”]There’s wisdom in what Wix is saying, despite its appearance of foolish impracticality.
If you’re a follower of Jesus and have thought about his teachings you’ll see alot of similarities:
To save your life, you must lose it.[/quote]
Not applicable in the present circumstances. The paradox you cite refers to the body having to die before spiritual ressurection and everlasting life may carry on.
Again, we are not talking about a slap on the cheek in this matter.
OK, Saddam has lived by the sword, now he will die by the sword. Yes, this applies to the current circumstances.
I’m fairly certain I know the real source of the problems in the middle east, and for most middle-east nations, neither Israel nor the US is the real problem for these nations. Scapegoats.
Of course he is both. And in order to treat the cause, both the cause and its symptom(s) must be treated.
Iraq is just one piece of the puzzle. A democratic Palestinian state and a reformed Iraq, once it needs no longer fear Iraq, will, hopefully, put pressure on Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia to reform. So, yes… I think once Saddam is gone the pieces to the peace puzzle can start being put into place.
If you are correct, then we will be right back where we have been for the past 50 years. I think its high time that somebody tried something different, and I applaud the President for his initiative. Gotta start somewhere.
Nonviolent resistance is sometimes useful but not in this case. If nonviolence is really useful then why aren’t the Iraqis using it? Because with really brutal dictators it won’t work.
If you look at the history of nonviolence (MLK Jr. in the USA, Gandhi against the British) then you’ll see that those kinds of methods only work against oppressors that can eventually be shamed out of their actions; oppressors who won’t just outright kill everyone that opposes them. Having a realitively free press to cover it all also helps. Iraq doesn’t have either of those.
Check out this perspective from a lefty journalist who found out what Baghdad was really like:
pbs.org/frontlineworld/stori … index.html
[quote=“chessman71”]
Check out this perspective from a lefty journalist [/quote]
A lefty journalist?!? He works for The Times (owned by Rupert Murdoch). LOL
maybe he’s a lefty compared to me. 
Tigerman, I would be interested to hear your comment on the following quote.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
M.K. Gandhi
I made the point about education being important. I also said, [quote=“wix99”]It is no good saying let’s resist nonviolently once a full scale war has started. It takes time. You need people with knowledge and skills [/quote]
So perhaps more than anything else we need to start planning now to prevent another situation like this where war becomes seemingly inevitable. We need to educate people about nonviolence and how to use it.
George, what in the hell is going on with this ‘evidence of mass destruction’ thing you and your people keep talking about? Why don’t you just come out and say what the hell it is and where it’s stashed? Why all this pussing footing around and game playing? I just don’t get it.
Sam, you’ve got to promise me you won’t tell anybody what I’m about to tell you. Okay.
Okay.
Well the evidence we’ve got is records of all the chemical and biological weapons we had the CDC and US companies funnel to them in the '80s to fight off the Iranians with. We know exactly how much we gave them and how much was confirmed destroyed after Desert Storm and there’s still alot unaccounted for.
But why did you give the Iraqis stuff like that? It seems crazy to be giving Saddam Hussein biological weapons under any circumstances.
Sam, back then Iran was our big enemy. We thought Saddam was just a small time thug under the thumb of the CIA and we could always keep him in check. Iran though had a much bigger army than Iraq and we were afraid Iraq would fall to Iran and then Iran would take over the Middle East and threaten Israel. When Iraq started unloading chemical weapons on the Iranians in battle the situation changed entirely and Iran was turned back.
Oh, I see. That’s why you keep saying you’ve got evidence but you don’t seem to know where any of the ‘evidence’ is right now and you can’t say why you know he’s got it.
Yeah, it’s a little embarrassing.
Yeah, big-time embarrassing.
Any chance this is going to get out before you can launch your invasion?
I don’t think so. We got a lid pretty well on everyone and the news media is playing along just letting this evidence thing sit there without asking any of the obvious questions. We just started the rumor that we can’t tell anyone what the evidence is because it would compromise our intelligence sources and that seems to be throwing people off pretty well too.
Yeah, it took you guys a while to come up with that one. I noticed that none of your big guys like Colin or Condoleeza are saying it’s because of concerns about intelligence sources. I would have thought they would have been the ones saying something like that.
Can’t have them on record saying it if the truth ever goes mainstream.
Yeah, that would be a problem.
Hey, George, another thing that’s really been bothering me that I’d like to ask you about . . .
Don’t forget this one either. The CIA also trained Osama bin-Laden to fight the Russians in Afghanistan.
[quote=“wix99”]Tigerman, I would be interested to hear your comment on the following quote.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
M.K. Gandhi[/quote]
No, it doesn’t. We would each have one eye left to see with. I didn’t mean for that to be flippant. I simply disagree with the sentiment of the statement.
Look, if Saddam Hussein was a pacifist like yourself, then force would not likely be necessary. But he isn’t. He is a violent brute. In his case, I support taking both his eyes out.
According to a 1994 Senate report, private American suppliers, licensed by the U.S. Department of Commerce, exported a witch’s brew of biological and chemical materials to Iraq from 1985 through 1989. Among the biological materials, which often produce slow, agonizing death, were:
- Bacillus Anthracis, cause of anthrax.
- Clostridium Botulinum, a source of botulinum toxin.
- Histoplasma Capsulatam, cause of a disease attacking lungs, brain, spinal cord, and heart.
- Brucella Melitensis, a bacteria that can damage major organs.
- Clostridium Perfringens, a highly toxic bacteria causing systemic illness.
- Clostridium tetani, a highly toxigenic substance.
Also on the list: Escherichia coli (E. coli), genetic materials, human and bacterial DNA, and dozens of other pathogenic biological agents. “These biological materials were not attenuated or weakened and were capable of reproduction,” the Senate report stated. “It was later learned that these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to those the United Nations inspectors found and removed from the Iraqi biological warfare program.”
The report noted further that U.S. exports to Iraq included the precursors to chemical-warfare agents, plans for chemical and biological warfare production facilities, and chemical-warhead filling equipment.
The exports continued to at least November 28, 1989, despite evidence that Iraq was engaging in chemical and biological warfare against Iranians and Kurds since as early as 1984.
The American company that provided the most biological materials to Iraq in the 1980s was American Type Culture Collection of Maryland and Virginia, which made seventy shipments of the anthrax-causing germ and other pathogenic agents, according to a 1996 Newsday story.
Other American companies also provided Iraq with the chemical or biological compounds, or the facilities and equipment used to create the compounds for chemical and biological warfare. Among these suppliers were the following:
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Alcolac International, a Baltimore chemical manufacturer already linked to the illegal shipment of chemicals to Iran, shipped large quantities of thiodiglycol (used to make mustard gas) as well as other chemical and biological ingredients, according to a 1989 story in The New York Times.
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Nu Kraft Mercantile Corp. of Brooklyn (affiliated with the United Steel and Strip Corporation) also supplied Iraq with huge amounts of thiodiglycol, the Times reported.
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Celery Corp., Charlotte, NC
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Matrix-Churchill Corp., Cleveland, OH (regarded as a front for the Iraqi government, according to Representative Henry Gonzalez, Democrat of Texas, who quoted U.S. intelligence documents to this effect in a 1992 speech on the House floor).
The following companies were also named as chemical and biological materials suppliers in the 1992 Senate hearings on “United States export policy toward Iraq prior to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait”:
- Mouse Master, Lilburn, GA
- Sullaire Corp., Charlotte, NC
- Pure Aire, Charlotte, NC
- Posi Seal, Inc., N. Stonington, CT
- Union Carbide, Danbury, CT
- Evapco, Taneytown, MD
- Gorman-Rupp, Mansfield, OH
Additionally, several other companies were sued in connection with their activities providing Iraq with chemical or biological supplies: subsidiaries or branches of Fisher Controls International, Inc., St. Louis; Rhone-Poulenc, Inc., Princeton, NJ; Bechtel Group, Inc., San Francisco; and Lummus Crest, Inc., Bloomfield, NJ, which built one chemical plant in Iraq and, before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, was building an ethylene facility. Ethylene is a necessary ingredient for thiodiglycol.
In 1994, a group of twenty-six veterans, suffering from what has come to be known as Gulf War Syndrome, filed a billion-dollar lawsuit in Houston against Fisher, Rhone-Poulenc, Bechtel Group, and Lummus Crest, as well as American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) and six other firms, for helping Iraq to obtain or produce the compounds which the veterans blamed for their illnesses. By 1998, the number of plaintiffs has risen to more than 4,000 and the suit is still pending in Texas.
A Pentagon study in 1994 dismissed links between chemical and biological weapons and Gulf War Syndrome. Newsday later disclosed, however, that the man who headed the study, Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg, was a director of ATCC. Moreover, at the time of ATCC’s shipments to Iraq, which the Commerce Department approved, the firm’s CEO was a member of the Commerce Department’s Technical Advisory Committee, the paper found.
A larger number of American firms supplied Iraq with the specialized computers, lasers, testing and analyzing equipment, and other instruments and hardware vital to the manufacture of nuclear weapons, missiles, and delivery systems. Computers, in particular, play a key role in nuclear weapons development. Advanced computers make it feasible to avoid carrying out nuclear test explosions, thus preserving the program’s secrecy. The 1992 Senate hearings implicated the following firms:
- Kennametal, Latrobe, PA
- Hewlett Packard, Palo Alto, CA
- International Computer Systems, CA, SC, and TX
- Perkins-Elmer, Norwalk, CT
- BDM Corp., McLean, VA
- Leybold Vacuum Systems, Export, PA
- Spectra Physics, Mountain View, CA
- Unisys Corp., Blue Bell, PA
- Finnigan MAT, San Jose, CA
- Scientific Atlanta, Atlanta, GA
- Spectral Data Corp., Champaign, IL
- Tektronix, Wilsonville, OR
- Veeco Instruments, Inc., Plainview, NY
- Wiltron Company, Morgan Hill, CA
The House report also singled out: TI Coating, Inc., Axel Electronics, Data General Corp., Gerber Systems, Honeywell, Inc., Digital Equipment Corp., Sackman Associates, Rockwell Collins International, Wild Magnavox Satellite Survey, Zeta Laboratories, Carl Schenck, EZ Logic Data, International Imaging Systems, Semetex Corp., and Thermo Jarrell Ash Corporation.
Some of the companies said later that they had no idea Iraq might ever put their products to military use. A spokesperson for Hewlett Packard said the company believed that the Iraqi recipient of its shipments, Saad 16, was an institution of higher learning. In fact, in 1990 The Wall Street Journal described Saad 16 as “a heavily fortified, state-of-the-art complex for aircraft construction, missile design, and, almost certainly, nuclear-weapons research.”
Other corporations recognized the military potential of their goods but considered it the government’s job to worry about it. “Every once in a while you kind of wonder when you sell something to a certain country,” said Robert Finney, president of Electronic Associates, Inc., which supplied Saad 16 with a powerful computer that could be used for missile testing and development. “But it’s not up to us to make foreign policy,” Finney told The Wall Street Journal.
In 1982, the Reagan Administration took Iraq off its list of countries alleged to sponsor terrorism, making it eligible to receive high-tech items generally denied to those on the list. Conventional military sales began in December of that year. Representative Samuel Gejdenson, Democrat of Connecticut, chairman of a House subcommittee investigating “United States Exports of Sensitive Technology to Iraq,” stated in 1991:
“From 1985 to 1990, the United States Government approved 771 licenses for the export to Iraq of $1.5 billion worth of biological agents and high-tech equipment with military application. [Only thirty-nine applications were rejected.] The United States spent virtually an entire decade making sure that Saddam Hussein had almost whatever he wanted. . . . The Administration has never acknowledged that it took this course of action, nor has it explained why it did so. In reviewing documents and press accounts, and interviewing knowledgeable sources, it becomes clear that United States export-control policy was directed by U.S. foreign policy as formulated by the State Department, and it was U.S. foreign policy to assist the regime of Saddam Hussein.”
Subsequently, Representative John Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, investigated the Department of Energy concerning an unheeded 1989 warning about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. In 1992, he accused the DOE of punishing employees who raised the alarm and rewarding those who didn’t take it seriously. One DOE scientist, interviewed by Dingell’s Energy and Commerce Committee, was especially conscientious about the mission of the nuclear non-proliferation program. For his efforts, he received very little cooperation, inadequate staff, and was finally forced to quit in frustration. “It was impossible to do a good job,” said William Emel. His immediate manager, who tried to get the proliferation program fully staffed, was chastened by management and removed from his position. Emel was hounded by the DOE at his new job as well.
Another Senate committee, investigating “United States export policy toward Iraq prior to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait,” heard testimony in 1992 that Commerce Department personnel “changed information on sixty-eight licenses; that references to military end uses were deleted and the designation ‘military truck’ was changed. This was done on licenses having a total value of over $1 billion.” Testimony made clear that the White House was “involved” in “a deliberate effort . . . to alter these documents and mislead the Congress.”
American foreign-policy makers maintained a cooperative relationship with U.S. corporate interests in the region. In 1985, Marshall Wiley, former U.S. ambassador to Oman, set up the Washington-based U.S.-Iraq Business Forum, which lobbied in Washington on behalf of Iraq to promote U.S. trade with that country. Speaking of the Forum’s creation, Wiley later explained, “I went to the State Department and told them what I was planning to do, and they said, ‘Fine. It sounds like a good idea.’ It was our policy to increase exports to Iraq.”
Though the government readily approved most sales to Iraq, officials at Defense and Commerce clashed over some of them (with the State Department and the White House backing Commerce).
“If an item was in dispute, my attitude was if they were readily available from other markets, I didn’t see why we should deprive American markets,” explained Richard Murphy in 1990. Murphy was Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs from 1983 to 1989.
As it turned out, Iraq did not use any chemical or biological weapons against U.S. forces in the Gulf War. But American planes bombed chemical and biological weapons storage facilities with abandon, potentially dooming tens of thousands of American soldiers to lives of prolonged and permanent agony, and an unknown number of Iraqis to a similar fate. Among the symptoms reported by the affected soldiers are memory loss, scarred lungs, chronic fatigue, severe headache, raspy voice, and passing out. The Pentagon estimates that nearly 100,000 American soldiers were exposed to sarin gas alone.
After the war, White House and Defense Department officials tried their best to deny that Gulf War Syndrome had anything to do with the bombings. The suffering of soldiers was not their overriding concern. The top concerns of the Bush and Clinton Administrations were to protect perceived U.S. interests in the Middle East, and to ensure that American corporations still had healthy balance sheets.
Why stop there? I suspect Mr T is going soft.