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You twist the truth again. Saddam armed himself, largely, playing the big powers against each other as he saw fit. He got the bulk of Soviet aid in the early 70s, before turning openly anti-communist by the end of the decade. And when the US began using him to fight Iran, he got quite a bit of help from Saint Ronnie himself. http://www.iranchamber.com/his...

So just like how Iran launched chemical weapons into Iraq in the 90s and killed thousands of people? You do realize that Iran has an air force that they have used offensively, right?

So wrong... where to begin? Well for starters the Iran/Iraq war was from 1980-1988, NOT in the 90's (that was our turn in Iraq.)

In no way do I want to defend Iran, but you have your facts backward. Iraq launched the Iran/Iraq war, but when Iran started sending human waves which were pushing the Iraqi's back, Iraq started to use chemical weapons.

and in case you don't like the first link more here

God I hate slashdot some days.

It must really suck to be shown reality that disagrees with your own.

Start with this and this.

You're generally an "Islamists are teh ebil!" type though, so I doubt if this will change your already made-up mind. You can probably rationalize both of those links as being "liberal media misinformation."

--Jeremy

So did the US. Don't believe me? The US protected the bombers of Cubana Flight 455, who included CIA operatives, in 1976. The year before, in 1975, the US supported Indonesia's invasion of East Timor, in which 200,000 East Timorese were massacred. In 1973 the US supported Gen Pinochet's overthrow of Chile's democratically elected government in a coup d'état Thousands of people disappeared afterwards. The US has a history of arming and supporting repressive regimes with large human rights violations.

Heck, at the same tyme the US was supporting Saddam, the US was also arming Iran, who he was fighting against. If the US had allowed democracy in Iran, instead of aiding the overthrow of Iran's elected government and installing the Shah in a dictatorship, there would not have been the revolution in Iran in 1980.

As far as Iraq goes, we had a treaty in place that allowed us to investigate them at will and they broke that treaty.

What treaty was broken and when? After Scott Ritter came out and stated Iraq had no significant WMDs the Neocons in Bush Jr's admin had to besmear him for not supporting their lies.

As for breaking treaties, the US has broken many treaties. I can think of 2 treaties Bush Jr broke or tried to break. With Starwars he was breaking the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia. In trying to locate the permanent nuclear waste disposal site at Yucca Mount he would also have violated the Treay of Ruby Valley which granted the Western Shoshone Yucca Mount and the surrounding land. The US broke a number of treaties with the Sioux. When Andrew Jackson forced the Cherokee to march on the Trail of Tears he broke a treaty when the Cherokee.

The US also supports Israel who has consistently disregarded UN resolutions, there was an uproar when VP Biden went to Israel and they announced more settlements in occupied territory.

the point was to keep Iran's military in line.

Why then did Reagan administration officials sell weapons to Iran in the Iran-Contra Affair? Quite simply they were supporting a number of different sides who were repressive.

At that time there was also a threat by the Soviets against northern Yemen (after they invaded Afghanistan) and Iraq was prepping to fight with Saudi Arabia to defend against them.

Afghanistan was the Soviet's Vietnam. And the same Muslims going there to fight would have fought for the Saudis as well, heck a lot of Saudis went to Afghanistan. After Saddam's invasion of Kuwait al qaeda offered to protect Saudi Arabia against Saddam. They would have caused the Soviets trouble too.

By the way, the USA did NOT give Saddam chemical weapons. Did you just make that up?

• How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical Weapons
• Reagan's WMD Connection to Saddam Hussein
• Where Did Saddam Get His Chemical Weapons?
• Arming Iraq: A Chronology of U.S. Involvement
• How Did Iraq Get Its Weapons? We Sold Them
• Congressional Record: September 20, 2002

So a sci fi dictates near/future technlogy? Wonderful

Its easy to create electrical current. The Iranians did it during the First Century.

Now what would be hard would be hard to repair is EMP damaged hardware.... that would be hard indeed without 20th century hardware or know how.

Of course, one needs a capacitor explosion ~1km above ground level before severe EM destruction takes place.

I'm glad to see that someone still remembers things like Iran/Contra and the Shaw (and the CIA engineered coup that brought him to power in the first place).

In the early 1970's Iran was the shining star of capitalism in the Middle East, and was the biggest US interest in the region. The US sold some of it's finest military hardware to the Shaw - some $20 Billion in arms from 1970-78 mostly coming from Oil profits. Meanwhile, the Shaw jailed or tortured some 20,000 political prisoners to keep the country "friendly" to US companies. The Islamic leaders used the resulting unrest among the population to launch their revolution.

To anyone who has studied the history, the foreign policy blunders that led to Iran becoming an enemy of the United States are painfully clear. What we should be asking ourselves now is how to keep it from happening again in places like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

which has been governed by radical priests for too long

Well, had the CIA not overthrown the nascent Iranian democracy and replaced it with a brutal totalitarian regime, the mad priests would probably not have gotten a foothold.

But we can't have that, can we? How else would the US justify their invasions in oil-rich countries.

Um, no. The Shah was installed in 1953, after FDR left office. It was the Eisenhower administration that was responsible.

http://www.iranchamber.com/history/coup53/coup53p1 .php

Saddam was a US-backed assassin charged with killing the Iraqi prime minister:

http://www.rise4news.net/Saddam-CIA.html

Here's a picture of Donald Rumsfeld shaking the hand of his good buddy Saddam:

http://cnparm.home.texas.net/911/Backg/Rumsfeld-Sa ddam.jpg

During the Iran-Iraq war, the US fully approved of the use of chemical weapons against Iran:

http://www.antiwar.com/glantz/?articleid=2804

Why were WMD ok back then, but not now? Huh? Does anyone have an answer for me?

And what was the US's interest in the war anyway? They wanted to stop the revolution in Iran, the revolution to overthrow the brutal dictator that they themselves installed! Instead of letting a country's people decide their own destiny and form of government, which might affect the flow or price of oil, the US would rather prop up brutal dictators.

Carter is not at issue here. If the US hadn't planted a dictator there to begin with, we wouldn't be in this situation, and the people in that region would have no reason to be angry with us for interfering in their affairs.

For anyone raised with decent morals and values, it should be plain that all of these actions by the US were downright wrong. The fact that the US acted out of self-interest alone, instead of having any concern for the people in those countries, is an act of evil. On a personal level, that's how people who have no conscience, called sociopaths, act: with regard only to their own self-interest. What's interesting is that all the people who claim to be "good christians" and standing for "family values" are the ones who promote this sociopathy on a national level.

No, but you sure can blame Bush for the failed coup in Venezuela on April 11th, 2002. The motive seems to have been the same as the one in Iran.

Except that the United States never gave and WMD to Iraq. None whatsoever...It wasn't until the late 1980's when Saddam used WMD on his people, and by then relations with the U.S. had cooled.

Uh...

Don't take this the wrong way, but you're, objectively and factually, completely wrong.

Summary: throughout the '80s, the US provided, allowed the shipment from US companies, and funnelled through other nations in the region weapons (including Howitzers, helicopters, and missile technology), chemical and biological agents (including some that may have been used against US troops in the first Gulf War), and other ``dual use'' technologies to Iraq.

This persisted through the late '80s, long after Iraq initially used chemical weapons against Iran in the early part of the war and a fair amount after it became clear that Iraq was carrying out a campaign against Kurdish militants that included widespread use of chemical weapons.

During this time, US ambassadors and politicians insisted that Iraq and the US had a strong interest in each other and would have a long and rosy future ahead, and US military intelligence provided Iraq with intelligence that would play a key part in strategic planning for campaigns against both the Iranians and the Kurdish rebels that included widespread use of chemical weapons.

Nice try, though.

Actually, the battery is now believed to be much, much older.
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Actually, the battery is now believed to be much, much older.
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Please do be so kind as to wrap URL references in the appropriate HTML....

I'm killing time right now, so I'm going to be long winded ;)

> The Aryans, as an ancient civilization, grew up in what is now known as Iran

Persians do call their earliest civilization "Aryan", but so do parts of Germany and India. As far as I am concerned, "Aryan" is a term a lot of people are quick to claim, but have little to back it up. Here's what I understand from the mythology (you really can't call it history):

There was once a group of very early men (~4000 BC) who emerged out of Central Asia (and possibly Persia) and, in a Dune-like Scattering, went forth to South Asia towards the East and parts of Europe towards the West. Alternatively, they originated in Europe and spread Eastward. These people effectively were the stock from which all other Aryan nations originated.

There was never a "Aryan" civilization in the sense of a Greek, Roman , Chinese or Indus Valley civilization, i.e., pre/historic ruins and so forth. The only (scant) evidence is linguistic roots: words like "apel" (apple) and "mater" (mother) repeat time and again in several languages in the Indo-European family, suggesting a shared past.

> India never industrialized on their own

India was under British rule (the East India Company: case study of what happens when a giant multinational corporation owns a country :-D) at the time of the Industrial Revolution, and industrialization in India was discouraged when it was economically beneficial to Britain. Example: Cloth mills were not allowed in India for a very long time because the East India company's monopoly on importing cloth from England's famous Lancashire mills would be busted. (In fact, Gandhi later used the spinning wheel as a form of civil disobedience for just this reason -- he would rather make his rough homespun cloth himself than wear high-priced imported cloth)

After Independence, India _did_ industrialize. Not to the same extent as Europe/America, chiefly because (a) unfortunately because of a socialist/Gandhian hangover, India's early leaders somehow equated industry with evil (not unlike some slashdotters of today ;), and (b) because India is very energy-poor country and simply cannot afford to buy the energy (i.e., oil/gas) it would take to have high levels of industrialization and (c) the large population makes labor cheap, so there's little incentive to build labor-saving devices.

> and to my knowledge has never been a world power (even in anciet times)

India, like Europe, was a collection of States. Before the British conquest, there were only 2 or 3 instances when one Indian ruler held territory equivalent to even ~80% of what India is today. The idea of "one India" is, ironically, an English one.

That said, like China for much of its history, kings of these Indian states had a rather inward-looking outlook (Something about Eastern philosophy?). It (generally) projected no naval power, sent out no missionaries nor missions of conquest (apart from some early forays into SE Asia, which is why the world largest Hindu temple is in Cambodia, not India).

> untouchable

Btw, untouchability is illegal under the Indian consitution. India has plenty of problem, yes, but untouchability in everyday life isn't one of them.

Even caste, that bugbear of Indian civilization is becoming less of problem (although it hasn't vanished) as folk become more educated and urbanized. It's often said that the degree to which caste is a problem in a given Indian region is inversely proportional to the spread of MTV, HBO and Pepsi there :)

I agree. I still don't think the recent discovery that mehtods to generate electricity were know about 2000 years ago receives enough recognition: More here

plate armor probably seemed impregnable in practical terms, until the longbow came along. Yeah, okay, a stinking peasant could hamstring a warhorse and beat the knight to death with a rock while he lay helpless on the ground, but these possibilities were probably ignored with the same superstitious enthusiasm that sysadmins ignore the rarer kinds of attacks on their systems.

OK, first up, the longbow predates the use of plate armor by quite a bit. And there were composite bows (horn/bone/wood/sinew laminates, don't confuse composite with compound aka pulley-type bows) in military use that were capable of penetrating plate long before the English/Welsh longbow became the terror of Crecy and Agincourt. The Parthian horse-archers used composite bows against the armies of the Greek city-states in ancient times!

Second, the knightly class certainly did not ignore the possibility of being brought down by the peasantry. Feudal European military castes preferred to capture their opponents alive whenever possible, because of the practice of ransoming captured enemies for enormous sums. The knighthood would claim that they only wanted to fight their equals for reasons of honor, but more practically they stood a better chance of surviving a defeat by a "gentle-man" than by a peasant levy armed with a hammer or spear (who would be unlikely to gain any significant fraction of a ransom). It's a classic risk/benefit analysis: don't start bar-fights with little guys, you have little to gain and much to lose!

Note: I don't disagree with your point, but rather with the example you used to illustrate it. Defense in depth is better than Maginot lines, combined arms are better than reliance on a single weapon, and the history of conflict is an infinite loop of thesis/counter-thesis/synthesis.