Domain: usip.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to usip.org.
Comments · 7
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Re:I live in Canada
At this point, it has very little to do with communism. Florida is a big primary state and a big electoral state. Florida has a lot of Cuban-americans who would prefer we invade the island. They have traditionally fiercely opposed lifting the
No, it is still pretty much about the oppressive communist state of Cuba. There won't be any US invasion of Cuba, the US pledged to not do that as part of settling the Cuban missile crisis.
Looking Back on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 50 Years Later
the Soviets removed the missiles already deployed in Cuba, and Soviet ships under sail with missile cargoes returned to Soviet ports. In return, the United States agreed to remove a squadron of already obsolete medium-range Jupiter missiles based in Turkey as long as that part of the deal was kept secret. In addition, the United States publicly pledged it would not invade Cuba.
Activists in Cuba support the continuation of the embargo.
The Time to Help Cuba’s Brave Dissidents Is Now: Why the Embargo Must Not be Lifted
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Re:Doesn't matter what country you are in...
http://www.usip.org/events/haiti-republic-ngos
At least 3,000 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are operating in Haiti.
Indeed I do. Again, you're ducking the point of my presenting these facts, which pretty much means we're done.
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Re:Apparently war comes with Democrats or Republic
A war fighting a country that has not attacked us, nor attacked any other country...
Well, I suppose that someone could consider that statement not palpably idiotic, for some value of "any other" that excludes the country of Iran,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Iraq_War
the country of Kuwait,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War
genocide of the ethnic nation of Kurdistan,
http://www.hrw.org/reports/1991/IRAQ913.htm
genocide of the ethnicity of Marsh Arabs,
http://www.usip.org/newsmedia/releases/2002/nb20021125.html
and assorted offenses against Turkmens, Shi'a, and every other non-Sunni-Arab religion/ethnicity in the region.
How are they comparable?
That's a good question. But for the exact opposite reason you ask it. The genocidal offenses documented above are much more than anything Hitler was known to have done at the time the U.S. declared war on Germany despite never being attacked by Germany, only by a *very* loosely allied country on the completely opposite side of the globe.
From any humanist -- OR pragmatic -- perspective, war to remove Saddam Hussein was unquestionably far more justified than declaring war on Germany was. -
Re:How long
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Re:Where?USIP published a book a couple of years ago on this. The report page for it lists a number of them at the bottom.
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Re:Iraq was not originally a desert.
You want sources for the draining of the southern Iraqi marshes? Googling on 'marsh', 'arab', 'drain and 'iraq' gets me 1130 hits. Number 1 is a Voice of America site and number 2 is an American University site, so I guess they fail your GWB/Rummy filter. Number 3 is an article by Robert Fisk however:
"The first time I saw the Marshes, just east of the Baghdad-Basra highway, the tourist guide was true to its words. For miles, thousands of reed huts stood on earth and papyrus islands, each inhabited by the descendants of the ancient Sumerians, a time warp of simplicity which, according to old Arabic scripts, may have begun with a devastating flood around AD620. The last time I went there, the women from one Marsh Arab village were prostituting themselves to lorry driversto make money for their impoverished families."
Its hosted on a website called Common Dreams which looks to be fairly left-leaning as far as I can see.
Link number 4 which is an article hosted on the South Wales Worker's Education Association website (not a notable hotbed of neo-con thinking) which cites UN studies and includes some comparitive Landsat images:
"This section marshals the latest evidence of a tragedy developing in Iraq since the 1970s. The drainage of the wetlands that have been home to the Ma'dan or Marsh Arabs for 5,000 years."
Link 5 is an article on the US Institute of Peace website, but this is a congressionally funded federal agency so probably fails your GWB filter.
Link 6 is a page on a personal webpage of some bloke called Mike. I don't think he's a sock-puppet for GWB, indeed looking at the site index he seems to be fairly right-on sort of chap (albeit with unfortunate goth-ey tendencies back in the 80s). Here's the first sentence:
"These satellite photos reveal exactly how Saddam Hussein is systematically draining the marshes of southern Iraq, transforming a unique eco-system into a man-made desert and destroying the ancient home of the Ma'dan or Marsh Arabs."
Link 7 is a BBC website for children. Here's the text:
"There are about 250,000 of this Shia Muslim group, also called Madan, living in Iraq. They originally lived in the marshes around the southern end of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
After the first Gulf War, they tried to overthrow Saddam. The Iraqi government stopped them.
Saddam's government decided to drain the marshes, which split up all the Madan. This removed their ability to threaten the old regime."
Link 8 is another personal webpage, this time for a Dutch doctoral student in mathematics. It has photos of a trip he took to Iraq as part of a delegation trying to overturn the sanctions that existed post-GW1, so I think its reasonable to conclude that he doesn't much care for GWB.
Link 9 is a State dept website, so probably fails your GWB-filter.
Link 10 is a Kuwaiti website, so they probably count as GWB's sock-puppets for you.
There you go. Five out of the 10 are probably tainted for you (although I note that only 1 is an overt propaganda site). If that ratio holds good for the rest of the links then you've got 560 more webpages you can read.
Regards Luke
PS Dunno why the l
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Names
Where I work, The United States Institute of Peace, we have each of our printers named with the room number, and the name of a Nobel Peace Prize winner.