Slashdot Mirror

Yea right... Two sides....

One with weaponary deficient by world war 2 standards, the other with 21st century weaponary.

Only one side has the capability to stop raining cluster and 500lbs bombs on civilian populations, and to stop Apache helicopters from targeting red cross vehicles. Oh and if you're gonna say accidents happen... you should read this the ambulance sent to help the wounded from this ambulance was also hit. Israeli's must have a sense of humour, they drop pamphlets telling people to leave then they target any vehicle "capable of carrying weapons". Maybe they should all be escaping by unicycles ?

Yea right... Two sides....

One with weaponary deficient by world war 2 standards, the other with 21st century weaponary.

Only one side has the capability to stop raining cluster and 500lbs bombs on civilian populations, and to stop Apache helicopters from targeting red cross vehicles. Oh and if you're gonna say accidents happen... you should read this the ambulance sent to help the wounded from this ambulance was also hit. Israeli's must have a sense of humour, they drop pamphlets telling people to leave then they target any vehicle "capable of carrying weapons". Maybe they should all be escaping by unicycles ?

No prescience required. Common sense and logic is all it takes. Something the proponents of war were all clearly short on, but quite long on adrenaline, lust to kill and self-righteous belief in their own infallibility. And they all have been proven wrong. So now you pretend that this prediction was somehow un-imaginably unlikely to be made correctly. Amusing to watch, but no one is buying this crap, and you know it.

Funny, if there were no WMDs where is your righteous indignation against all the children starved to death under UN sanctions against those very nonexistent WMDs?

Many of us (myself included) opposed the sanctions as ineffective and poorly targeted. The very same people however, who later were chief proponents of war, were insisting on the sanctions. US and UK hard-ons for Saddam were so large that they began stopping shipments of food and medicine, hoping to starve Iraq into revolt, and prevented charity organizations from sending relief. This alone tells everything one has to know about the fake concern of war proponents for the "Iraqi people". Were it not for stranded Indian workers, the resolution 666 would not have passed due to this vicious US and UK attitude and not even the crude, corrupt and unwieldy "food-for-oil" program would be in place.

Unless of course you claim that the UN proved to be too easily influenced and not resistant enough to belligerent US and UK pressure. In which case I do concur.

You're engaging in revisionist history. The UN wasn't verifying this, because the inspectors did not have the freedom they needed to verify it. But don't let the facts get in your way.

Quoth Scott Ritter:

I bear personal witness through seven years as a chief weapons inspector in Iraq for the United Nations to both the scope of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs and the effectiveness of the UN weapons inspectors in ultimately eliminating them.

While we were never able to provide 100 percent certainty regarding the disposition of Iraq's proscribed weaponry, we did ascertain a 90-95 percent level of verified disarmament. This figure takes into account the destruction or dismantling of every major factory associated with prohibited weapons manufacture, all significant items of production equipment, and the majority of the weapons and agent produced by Iraq.

With the exception of mustard agent, all chemical agent produced by Iraq prior to 1990 would have degraded within five years (the jury is still out regarding Iraq's VX nerve agent program - while inspectors have accounted for the laboratories, production equipment and most of the agent produced from 1990-91, major discrepancies in the Iraqi accounting preclude any final disposition at this time.)

The same holds true for biological agent, which would have been neutralized through natural processes within three years of manufacture. Effective monitoring inspections, fully implemented from 1994-1998 without any significant obstruction from Iraq, never once detected any evidence of retained proscribed activity or effort by Iraq to reconstitute that capability which had been eliminated through inspections.

Revisionist history indeed. Your specialty, may I add.

Zero over the fact that the UN left the Iraqi rebellion to die horribly after the first Gulf War

Right. I see. So the UN should have amassed an army and rolled over Iraq, helping the Shia, bringing "prosperity", "freedom" and "democracy" and to be, in return, showered with

You mean Westernize them like this: ""One story is of a young girl who is 16 years old," he says of one of the testimonies he video taped recently, "She stayed for three days with the bodies of her family who were killed in their home. When the soldiers entered she was in her home with her father, mother, 12 year-old brother and two sisters. She watched the soldiers enter and shoot her mother and father directly, without saying anything."

The girl managed to hide behind the refrigerator with her brother and witnessed the war crimes first-hand.

"They beat her two sisters, then shot them in the head," he said. After this her brother was enraged and ran at the soldiers while shouting at them, so they shot him dead. "??

There's more, a lot more, here. I'm not sure that we are creating many friends in Iraq or anywhere in the Mideast, except Israel. Polls of Iraqis show the overwhelming majority want us gone, now or in the very near future. But the US Army is not planning to leave anytime soon.

To say nothing of Abu Graib, etc.

So tell me again--how are we helping them, exactly?

LOOK at what you are doing fucking bastard gringos! STOP NOW !!!

How about the people actually living in Iraq?

the WAS no health care

false, although at the end of 10 year sanction cycle little remained.

Saddam was siphoning all the money away

False, he was siphoning some of the money away. Evil tyrant as he was, he considered himself an avenging Arab hero and was a patriot (notice that he didnt run away to a safe country like virtually any other 2-bit dictator in history?). His deluded ideas on how to go about making Iraq better are another discussion.

As far as foreign ownership of oil, that's total BS, Iraq's own president has said as much.

What? What? The who said that? Oh you mean the US-installed ex-CIA henchman whose speeches are written by White House staffers? Right.

Notice the policy says ALLOW, not WILL. Iraqi's can buy Iraqi companies, and many ex-pat Iraqis are working on doing just that.

This is a downward spiral of complete nuttiness. Yes in theory Iraqis can own Iraqi companies but when it comes to a bidding proces between Ahmed the Fallafel-Stand-Man and an ex-patriot Texaco front-man I do truly wonder which one will win. No other country had these sort of rules implemented ever. All require significant portion of local ownership and all require that a major share of profits is reinvested locally. Bremer's rules are the apex of neo-con insanity and make Iraq an exception in the history of the planet as well as the very reason we are there in the first place: to perform an experiment in unrestricted capitalism. All that other hogwash about "freedom" is just that. Too bad children had to lose their limbs over it.

Dahr Jamail Iraq